


A History

by jyuanka



Category: Hunter X Hunter
Genre: (a lot of it), Animal Death, Body Horror, Child Death, Eco Horror, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Horror, M/M, Multi, Mystery, OT3, Polyamory, Romance (debatably), Unethical Medicine, general weirdness
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-22
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:29:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 129,193
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27594839
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jyuanka/pseuds/jyuanka
Summary: Within the pages of an urgent report she receives from a team of civilian scientists stationed at the Dark Continent, Cheadle finds a cryptic message from Ging asking her to return, and to bring Pariston—now an ex-Hunter under house arrest—with her.AKA three horny people ruin each other’s lives while trying to survive the most dangerous place on Earth, and each other.
Relationships: Ging Freecs/Cheadle Yorkshire, Ging Freecs/Pariston Hill, Ging Freecs/Pariston Hill/Cheadle Yorkshire, Pariston Hill/Cheadle Yorkshire
Comments: 80
Kudos: 35





	1. They Built You a Castle

**Author's Note:**

> This is the tightest, most consistent piece of writing I did since 2016, and I'm inordinately proud of it. In my head since 2018 and taking shape since then, writing this story has consumed my life for the better part of a year. I never wrote anything with this much trust or joy.
> 
> This story is for people who are craving serious OT3 writing in this fandom, specifically paricheadleging (read: me), which I'm here to deliver.
> 
> When this story isn't about disease and death and pain and loss, it's about messy people having messy feelings for one another. It's monstrously, grotesquely long. You've been warned.
> 
> All that said, if you stick around, I hope you enjoy it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Tell me, for which of my bad parts didst thou first fall in love with me?"
> 
> \- Benedick, Much Ado About Nothing

**PART I **

** CHEADLE **

* * *

Outside the Hunter Association tower, the setting sun burned a flaming hole in a melting purple sky, setting the glass façade of the building on a psychedelic frenzy of reflected colors.

Cheadle pulled the drapes shut and called off a meeting with a gaggle of foreign investors, stood in the doorway of her office watching Beans scuttle across the hallway to relay her change of mind to the suits on the fifth floor. Escort them out, she said.

The stone ring around her ankle stung, stung in the way it does when she becomes aware of it, when she remembers its existence, when the presence of it takes her off guard, and it’s been stinging her all day.

Her toes curled from the prickle of pain, and all of a sudden she felt exceptionally old and tired, wanted the day to be over already as she walked back into her office and closed the door behind her.

A day-old, novella-length printed digital report sat ruffled on her desk, one picture within its unfolded pages stared back at her, that of a dead child, eyes closed and mouth agape, dead in the middle of an inhale, dead before he was able to take a last breath.

There were other pictures, too, some more gruesome than this one, and she was exhausted from looking at them and pouring over the long, duly-documented list of symptoms, failed treatments, diets, side effects to said treatments and diets, resultant behavior, followed by detailed descriptions of the last death throes.

But this was new. She thought of all the people and things that were brought back with them from the Dark Continent, of the ill who did not survive and the creatures who began a slow process of disintegration and then fizzled out of existence, as if sucked into the vacuum of space, as if having exited the stratosphere without proper equipment. Others, however, thrived in strange ways, reacted with vigor to the new atmosphere in the mainland, germinated and spread and had to be exterminated. 

Cheadle knew better than to believe she’d seen it all. There were always new things like these that gave her a stop, new things that made her return to the library, cases that revitalized love for the practice, in selfish, roundabout ways.

But it wasn’t the report or the pictures that made her heart sink, that left her so agitated and unsure. It was something else, something that had found its way inside the report, perhaps, she’d wager, without the knowledge of those who’d compiled and sent it.

The secret letter had been in her pocket since yesterday, had been in her hand for hours, and she checked that it was still there every other minute, the possibility of losing it making her palms clamp in anxious fear.

It was him, no doubt about it. The hermit had finally come down from his cave to send her a cryptic letter in digital code.

Ging Freecs didn’t retire. Never officially, anyway. Never entirely. Last she’s heard of him he’s been inhabiting some godforsaken mountain on the Dark Continent, turning into moss and sludge for all she knows, and that was years ago. He still enjoyed a privileged status as In-Commission despite the fact that he was, and under all relevant clauses, missing and out of service.

Nobody really knew where he was, or if he was even alive to begin with. No reports turned up but neither did a dead body, yet here he was, reminding her of the ancient certainty that, barring any abnormal circumstances, she was definitely going to die before him.

The team of civilian scientists who had sent her the report did not ask her to come, personally, perhaps believing that the Chairman of the Hunter Association has no time for them; all they requested was assistance from their benefactors, but Ging requested something a little extra, and he requested it personally.

He wanted her to come to the Dark Continent, and for reasons only he knew, Ging didn’t bother mentioning any whys or hows or whens, only that he wanted her to come.

In these matters she felt terribly alone, once again sensed the walls pressing down on her, and then, in a way that was familiar and came almost naturally to her, Cheadle felt great resentment for Ging, for asking this from her, for even sending that letter the way he did—privately and secretly and concealed within another letter—leaving matters open-ended so that she only had two choices, and could only get closure by seeing him in person. 

Something about it told her that he didn’t want anybody else knowing about this little detour, if she chose to respond. Cheadle already wouldn’t have told the Zodiacs if there were still any to speak of. Dismantled by her four years ago, the council founded by Chairman Netero was no more.

Although Mizaistom was her advisor, he too did not learn about this. Not for the first time her voice of reason wasn’t privy to the smatterings of madness that surrounded her position. It’s not that she was afraid of hearing the truth when he says it—and he always says it—but afraid that she won’t listen. Was she being duplicitous, she wondered, because, worst of all, Ging didn’t want her to come alone.

He wanted Pariston to be there, too.

Ging wasn’t there during the trial and the subsequent settlements, plainly declined to be a witness, and then disappeared.

She hadn’t asked him what to do then. Back then she did something by her own accord, made a decision shared by nobody else, and she made it quickly and ruthlessly.

In court, and after a long, rigged trial that lasted months, Pariston finally stood and handed her his license, and only smiled when it was in her hand, smiled down at her and only her. His expression was incomprehensible, and he appeared neither resigned nor dejected, broken or defeated; he was as himself, a cornucopia brimming with everything she hated.

After that, the remnants of Pariston Hill were slowly but surely cleaned out of the Association. Bit by bit, she removed him out of everyone’s existence, politically, financially, aesthetically, even, swept him away so that no footprint remained. His supporters and loyalists and goons were dispossessed and weeded out, his policies altered and overturned. Under a wave of quiet, bottled-up rage, she erased him, because he deserved it, she believed, because he’d done numerous things that warranted retaliation, and because not doing so would have been selfish and dangerous. And in doing so it did not matter to her whether she was like Netero or not, or if the late chairman would have done it. 

Thus Pariston Hill had disappeared; except he was lodged deep in her spine, as impertinent and imperturbable as ever.

The ankle monitor stung yet again, reminding her that she had another decision to make, reminding her that in her quest to vanquish her nemesis she had inadvertently allocated herself as his only window to the outside world, chained herself to him, literally and figuratively, chose to be the jail and the jailor and the inmate. 

In more than ten years, Pariston had not seen any human being other than herself. Alone in his sprawling villa, she was the only person he was allowed to see.

He called her sometimes but she never called him. Last time she picked up the phone six months ago (a point-to-point landline made specifically to connect them) he asked her for books, because he’d read all the ones in his library. Twice. She dared to believe there was a hint of plea to his voice, and so she was tempted to refuse him. Read them a third time, she wanted to say, but she didn’t. Cheadle asked him what kind of books he wanted, so he asked her what she was reading, and when she lied and said that she wasn’t currently reading anything he sighed dramatically.

Eventually, at his request, she sent him a large package full of recently published YA bestsellers and classics in niche genres, all fiction because he admitted to being tired of all things academic. Cheadle wondered if he—almost completely alone with no links to the world around him—was reverting to some kind of boyhood with the type of books he asked her to select. Nonetheless, she made true on her word, and once the package arrived he called to thank her with a voice that sounded a little perkier, a little less bored.

For all she knew, he was a calamity in a bottle waiting to break free. She didn’t trust him an iota and for that knew the importance of keeping his mind sedated and his needs minimally fulfilled. At least that’s what she told herself.

Pariston was her own personal plague, something that she viewed as a personal responsibility and a personal failure. She could have killed him, she believed, if not legally then by other means, and it was a possibility long-pondered, frequently and in stark detail, but one that would have put an end to her career. Killing another Hunter was a crime, but the Chairman killing another Hunter would have been a political scandal, even if the Hunter in question was a criminal. The next best thing was to kill him spiritually. Break him and lock him away and rob him of all the joys of breaking others. She was doing the world a favor, of course she was. She did the right thing, the responsible thing, and she believed it whole-heartedly, supplanted personal grief with the greater good, had transformed her hatred of him into policy, banished him from everywhere except her own mind. 

That she enjoyed his suffering at times, devilishly and callously and with a relish of the basest sort, was the worst of Cheadle’s capacities, the frailest of her inclinations, but she didn’t know that yet. 

**III**

Next day, unknown but to the rising sun, Cheadle took her car and set out towards Sivan, a small town next to Swaldani, heading specifically for the Langres district, a small, gated community of about five residences stretching across thousands of acres, separated from one another by kilometers of grand pine forests. With the exception of the villa in which Pariston currently resided, the Association had bought out every other residence with its surrounding forests and courtyards.

For miles and miles across the outskirts of a once flourishing pocket of an unimportant port town, inside one of his own properties, Pariston Hill lived completely isolated from other humans.

Having not seen him in six years, Cheadle didn’t know what to expect, didn’t know what to feel except suffocation and dread. With each meter inside Langres the forests grew thicker and the paved roads between them narrower and the sunlight dimmer. Replace the tarmac path with cobblestones and the pines for oaks and she would have been back home, in the grand manor of her family, walking beside her bike, pebbles in her shoes, hair amess, dirt under her fingernails.

Her hands pressed on the steering wheel. It was like returning to the womb, a journey into a threshold that simply led nowhere because one can’t go back to the place of formation. For some reason she didn’t put on any music in the car; only the window at her side was open, only the cold, rolling winds of the district plied at her ears.

Cheadle was strung deep in a bizarre amalgamation of recollections so specific yet disparate that her view of the road before her grew blurry and watery. So lost was she in that state that when her phone rang her heart jumped out of her chest so violently she had to stop the car at once, the last memory flashing in her eyes one of herself as a teen crouched behind an oak tree, pretending that a fat cherry was a pair of lips.

When she saw the number, her eyes closed almost instinctively, as if in the darkness behind her eyelids she could pretend it was a different number on her screen and a different person calling her. Cheadle muted it and tossed it on the passenger seat in frustration, then leaned down over the steering wheel, taking a breath, trying to calm the wave of anxiety that had gripped her.

For a moment, seized by an adolescent fancy stirred up by her memories, she pondered exiting the car to walk into one of the mansions whose turret attics were jutting out behind rows of trees. Hoping to find what, she wasn’t sure—Perhaps the assertion that this place was nothing like her childhood home, or perhaps because she was afraid and apprehensive and wished to stall the inevitable, or, perhaps—and she did not like this at all— to know why she suddenly felt seen and watched.

Cheadle looked outside the window, her eyes wandered over the scenery, now murkier than before, even more obscure and ominous under the midday sun. 

There was nobody here, not among the trees and not inside that baronial mansion hidden by the forest. That specific thought, however, that nobody was there, that every inch of this place was abandoned, made her turn the engine immediately because for a second, just a second, the idea of not finding Pariston in his villa sent a wave of fear up her spine.

From the corner of her eye, the little screen had stopped blaring, and around her ankle the monitor stung, and because of the utter loneliness and desolation along the road, seeing the bedecked oriel windows of Pariston’s villa rise in the horizon loosened her shoulders and unwounded her stomach.

Beyond the outer parameters of the residence, surrounding the villa, along the nen-inscribed gate, was a long chain of laburnum trees, crisp and distinct amidst the dreary monotony of the pine forests, their bright yellow flowers raining down in rich clusters from high branches, little capsules of sunshine and virulence. Hundreds of these golden tears followed over her head as she entered the open gate and stepped under a seemingly never-ending pergola that extended all the way to the main entrance.

How like Pariston to line and canopy his walkway with beautiful poison. 

The place was quiet, peaceful, even, she dared think, for when her fears of not finding her old colleague resurfaced her ears picked up a song. Some tune or other was playing in the distance, reaching her in splinters and chips, growing clearer as she walked closer, then coalescing into a familiar melody once the tips of her boots hit the square of sunlight that unfurled after the pergola’s expansive shade.

Otello Barezzi. How gauche. Cheadle wanted to break out in mad laughter; she could swear her parents were here somewhere preparing themselves in awkward, suppressed joviality for their yearly summer trip out of the country to attend one of those mysterious opera shows the audio versions of which she only got to hear on vinyl and secretly hated every minute of it.

Cheadle knew that Pariston wasn’t inside the villa but somewhere in the surrounding garden, if the roaring, weepy voice of an aging opera singer had anything to say. Thus she ignored the large, ornamented wooden door in front of her and rounded a corner, coming face to face—perhaps too soon and a little before she was emotionally and mentally prepared for it—with a scene that was going to stick with her far much longer than she’d ever like.

Under a domed, wooden gazebo, among lush greenery that touched everything but the elevated pad, bathed in patches of sunlight was Pariston, sitting at a table, drinking what she assumed was tea, the whole set before him, and if not for the choice of book between his hands she could’ve taken this view for a classical painting.

“Mandango? Really?”

He was looking at her before she even said it, and for a long moment the two of them just stared at each other—she, glad that he was in fact where she had left him, an ephemera found in the haze of cleaning a room. He, perhaps befuddled to see her face, stood up suddenly, bookmarking the novel with a finger, and smiled wide enough she could see that no length of time could dim the whiteness of his teeth.

“Cheadle!”

“Pariston,” she walked closer to him as he descended the three steps from the gazebo down to the ground, hurrying towards her with large steps, and without warning, without a sliver of foresight, she was unceremoniously pulled into his arms.

“I’ve missed you.” He said, squishing her nose against his chest, then after a moment he drew back and held her face between his hands, his brown eyes as familiar as ever, twinkling in the sunlight, staring down at her with something akin to awe. “I had a feeling you were coming.”

He had the gall to twirl her around. She had the gall to let him do it.

“You’ve cut your hair. Again.” Pariston said, holding her at arm’s length to inspect her even further. “How long has it been, five years?”

“Six.”

“Right.” He let go of her.

She noticed how his once shiny, lustrous hair has now dulled into a grayish, weary blond, although no less cared for, and, she imagined, no less soft, although she had only touched it once. Has loneliness affected him? The years have certainly left their mark.

The man himself looked older, donning a different kind of poise than the one he sported so effortlessly back in the day; now he possessed the quiet poise of someone who had only themselves for company, for years on end. His hands were somewhat frailer, and creases framed his mouth when he smiled, and his gait was slower as he walked her round the garden and to a back door that led to a small, homely kitchen.

Her eyes sought the monitor around his ankle, hidden under a pair of simple brown pants. His style was different, like a primordial version of what he used to wear, stripped down and more befitting of middle class rurality than urban life. A white shirt, collar unbuttoned, under a casual vest, sleeves rolled up and she thought how it was the first time she saw his forearms. He was thinner, looked visibly weaker, more obvious now with his back turned to her.

Like a small town boy from the prairies, it all suited him awfully well. He looked handsome in a subtle, understated way, in a way that would have seemed alien to him only a couple years ago. He looked like himself yet not at all. Has his mental fortitude begun to collapse? She doubted it. Besides a simpler getup and a quieter voice and a longer period of silence between sentences, Pariston appeared as himself. To parse him so soon, Cheadle knew she couldn’t.

“Tea?” He asked, setting a kettle on a stove.

Cheadle sat to the table, watched him make tea without waiting for her answer, then he turned to her and smiled.

“How about matcha tea?” Pariston said, stretching his arm up to open a cupboard over his head. “I’m sure we have time to waste on making it.”

Yet still, Cheadle said nothing. Her eyes wandered the barren kitchen, landed at the counter and the fridge and at every cabinet, wondered what each of them held, wondered about the colors of the walls behind them, then she scoffed internally. She’d gone far to keep him alive; besides his vegetable garden, all that he needed to survive was dropped to him quickly and covertly at the gates of his house, and as she thought about it now it sounded ridiculous to her.

“Would you like to have it here or outside in the garden?” He asked her, holding a large tray between his hands.

“It’s become quite hot.”

Pariston looked outside the window with diffident eyes, as if he’s playing some previously rehearsed role. “Indeed,” his eyes shifted back to her and he smiled. “We’ll have it here, then.”

He placed the tray on the table and sat opposite her, then began the tedious process of making the tea. He had everything prepared; the caddy and the bowl, the spoon and the whisk.

“I’ve been trying to make wagashi, but to no success, sadly.” Pariston lamented, pouring the hot water into one of the bowls. “So, petit fours?” He nudged a small plate full of glazed biscuits in her direction. “They’re closer to my fort; we used to make them all the time as kids.”

Cheadle eyed the confectionary but didn’t take one. They looked delicious. “I see you’ve been keeping busy.”

“I am!” Pariston chuckled. “I’ve been baking all sorts of things lately; macarons, éclairs, lemon cakes.” Once again he nudged the plate towards her. “Go on, try one of them. I believe they’re good but I’m desperate for another opinion.”

And as if joining him in this little imaginary play of courtesy and civility, Cheadle took one of the petit fours—the round one with lemon jam and almonds and powdered sugar sprinkled on it—and bit into it, savoring the way the hard parts flaked and rifted between her teeth, the jam cold against the roof of her mouth, the powdered sugar clinging to the edges of her tongue, how it neutralized the bitterness of the fruit preserves and coalesced with the chewed biscuit base.

After a moment, she swallowed, kept her hands at her sides.

“It’s alright.”

Pariston smiled. “That’s good to hear! I had no idea the lemon jam would be so bitter.” He hummed, disappointed at himself for this great oversight. “I wonder if there’s a way around that?”

If there was one, Cheadle didn’t know it, wondered if he actually cared at all or if he was just upholding this charade. After all, he most certainly knew that she’d never visit him just to drink tea and chat about his latest baking endeavors.

She watched him scoop the green powder out of a small container and sift it through a sieve over the bowl. The powder snowed down, as green as the way her dye looked before she mixed it and applied it to her hair, its scent filling her nostrils.

This had to be the most modest tea ceremony she’s ever attended, felt forcibly invited and yet sat quietly, lulled into the serenity of observing the wooden whisk circling the inner edges of the ceramic bowl.

“I like your haircut.” He said, placing the bowl in front of her.

“Thank you.” She said, lifting the bowl to her lips.

Pariston picked up his own bowl, glanced at her over it. “Is it new?”

“Only a couple months old.”

He hummed. “Short hair suits you.”

“Yours has grown longer.”

His hand went to the long strands that caressed the nape of his neck. “I’m a bit of a flittermouse about cutting it myself.” He said. “I should have cut it before you came to visit me, no?”

“You _did_ sense that I was coming.”

“I did.” Pariston nodded, taking a sip from his tea. “Something about the changing of the seasons.”

“Aha.”

His eyes wandered over her face in that old way of theirs, the glaze of perpetual amusement and frayed curiosity, interested in their subject and not, veering into chaos, one foot into entropy, the other upon a cliff.

“I really like the change of appearance. Or should I say return?” He said after some silence, after he realized she won’t break her gaze. “I was never a fan of that dog getup you were so agreeable about adopting. It made you look dull and fat.”

“Are you trying to offend me?”

“I wouldn’t dare.” And when she didn’t reply with anything, he went on. “What made you move on?”

“My appearance isn’t something I wish to discuss with you.”

“Why not? Isn’t it something that matters to us both?” He inquired with childlike curiosity. “At least I’ve always imagined so. We both know how important it is, don’t we?” His eyes curved in a distant smile. “We’re all about appearances, you and me, so I find it curious that we’re sitting at my kitchen table, looking like two very normal people, without the armor of outlandish fashions, yet it feels more illusory than ever.” He hummed. “Or maybe it’s only because I haven’t seen your actual face in such a long time?”

“Maybe.” Cheadle murmured, her palms growing clammy around the hot tea bowl. She imagined her hands merging with the ceramic, becoming the ceramic, dissolving into it.

No face she ever had was one she liked; to her they were all interchangeable, some only slightly more protective than others, offered more comfort because they were a sturdier cover behind which she stuffed everything she hated about herself. But now, for a while, she only had her face, the basest of them all, the one her mother would recognize, despite, she liked to believe, the great changes it underwent through the years. In the haze of it, she thought that she felt nothing about any of it, not at that particular moment, anyway, and so she wished to finally end this hoax of domestic civility and just broach the reason behind her visit. 

“Ging sent me a letter.” She said, and at that point decided to pull out the scrap of paper from her pocket—mangled with her sweat and loose threads from her clothes; it had not left her palms until now—and gave it to Pariston, their fingers touching ever so slightly as the letter passed from her hand to his.

With a reverent gesture he took it, as if she was passing him a ceremonial sword, and his visage of mirth and cordiality fell into something more natural, more contemplative, the face of a man eager for words and communication, for this letter precisely, perhaps.

Pariston felt his own heartbeat, thumping incessantly, reminding him that he was alive and that the world was alive as well, and that it has—thumping incessantly to a rhythm far greater than his own—went on without him.

He could almost taste every anxiety and fear dwelling in the chest of his visitor on this letter, the words not hers neither the paper but only the hopes that any of this meant something beyond itself. So palpable it was that he felt it pass to him, and without any resistance accepted it, halved it between them, let it settle into his chest as well.

Oh, to know that Ging was still alive, still out there, his written, decoded words under Pariston’s finger and Pariston’s own name under Pariston’s finger and the paper felt like an antidote against his skin.

Something of his old self returned to him, the potential of a request fulfilled, and he returned the paper to her, setting it on the table between them, a hatchet of peace, perhaps, or a truce. “So like him, to be so cryptic.”

“It came with a report from the scientists in the southern settlement.” Cheadle said, folding the paper, shoving it back in her pocket, and he knew that she remembered it as well as he did, did not have to look again. “I believe he’d slipped it in there without their knowledge.”

“Does that change your decision?” Pariston asked.

“I haven’t made one yet.”

“Oh but you did,” Pariston tilted his head and smiled. “Why would you be here if you didn’t?”

Cheadle brought the tea bowl to her lips but didn’t take a sip, let it settle there for a moment before she put it down again. “I haven’t made a decision about the terms of it.”

“You want to discuss them with me?”

“There is nothing to discuss with you. You are a criminal.” She said, shifting her eyes from the distance between their hands on the table to his face. “Taking you with me won’t change that. Your legal status would remain as it is.”

Pariston hummed, unperturbed by her assertions. His legal status did not matter to him because he was no longer a public figure of any importance. How strange, he now realized, to be free of that. He may still exist as he was in the few who remembered him, but mostly in Cheadle’s eyes, which swam with a quiet viciousness that he enjoyed immensely. Looking into her eyes made him feel unchanged, and perhaps he has not changed at all, or only changed so far as it made the life she’s condemned him to more bearable.

“You must be asking what’s in it for you if I go,” he said. “Or wondering why Ging wants me there in the first place. He knows my situation, after all.” He watched her face, sought her eyes but they were distant. Did she want to comply with Ging’s wishes against her own? She was the type, unfortunately, and she was the type because she was worried that their old colleague might truly need them. But then why would he need Pariston, she must be thinking, and Pariston did not mind that for he knew that Ging needed him for nothing, but Pariston also knew that anything can be made from nothing, and that nothing was never just nothing. “It would be illegal to take me with you.”

“I’m perfectly aware.” Cheadle retorted.

“Of course you are,” Pariston said, splotching his finger with the jam he’s made, bringing it to his lips, sucking on it. “You’re the one who drafted the law, after all.”

Not a truce, it seemed, but a wedge. Pariston sighed.

“Come with me,” he said. “I want to show you something.”

And she did. With his hand on the small of her back, Pariston led her once again to the garden and towards an underground cellar the door of which was hidden under flowering shrubberies.

Descending the stairs, unease filled Cheadle’s heart. She felt like she was passing through spider webs, the way the thick air crept over her skin, how the darkness intensified the acidity in every breath she took. The heels of her boots clicked on the stone stairs, her fingers touched and did not touch the stone walls to her left, the fabric of Pariston’s vest to her right. The square of light behind her grew smaller and smaller and she didn’t turn back to gaze at it for fear that it would remind him of its existence and thus he would shut it over her, leaving her alone with him in the claustrophobia of tunnels and basements and cellars.

At last, they reached an underground room, and with a simple flick Pariston lit up the elliptical ceiling and the insulated walls.

A wine cellar with a long wooden table in the middle, stretching all the way across the rectangular space. She wanted to snort, in anxiety and amusement and to dispel the immediate thought that it all looked like an altar and that she was going to be served wine generously and then sacrificed in the stupor of inebriation. But to what gods did Pariston Hill pray. Which one of his gods would accept her as offering.

“I recall you have a taste for wine,” Pariston said, behind her and close to her and distressingly his hand was still on her back. She stepped away from him. “I haven’t shared any in ages, and it’s a shame because some of them are truly extraordinary.”

He wandered over to one of the farthest shelves, pulling out one of the bottles, examining the words written on it, returning it, pulling out another one. “Sivani or St. Denoir?” he glanced at her, ponderous. “Something tells me you’d like Sivani because of the subtlety and simplicity. It has a misty, almost mercurial taste about it, a trustworthy wine with a twist, but St. Denoir is simply the more sophisticated one; the nutty and fruity notes in it are marvelous. We can have a good old rosé if you wish, but if you’re feeling a bit more adventurous there’s always Kisreiya.”

Cheadle ignored him, her fingers trailing the wooden shelves, her eyes catching the glint of wine bottles, their mouths all turned towards her like cannons. Finally, her eyes landed on one, peculiar among his collection, the cheapest of the cheap and the worst of the worst, but with the leftovers of nostalgia from her car ride she pulled it off the shelf. Pariston made a face.

“Trotter?” He asked in a disappointed tone. “You know now I will be forced to drink it with you, it’s etiquette.”

Cheadle smirked and set the green bottle on the table. “Exactly.”

“You love to torture me,” Pariston said, removing two glasses from a corner rack with a resigned sigh. “The name is vulgar for wine, don’t you think? More befitting for a whiskey brand, but I guess this one can hardly be considered wine.” He brought the two glasses and set them on the table, passing her a conspiratorial smile. “I’ve always suspected you have a taste for the baser things in life.”

“You’d know, of course.” She said, following some unspoken codes, letting him pull the chair out for her, then sat on it, waiting for him to take the seat opposite her. His presence right behind her was one of the worst sensations she’s ever experienced, and she almost let out an audible sigh when he removed his hands off the chair and moved to the seat across from her.

Pariston opened the bottle, filling her glass then filling his, bringing the wine closer to his eyes for inspection. “The color is horrid, no?”

By the time he finally managed to bring himself to take a sip, Cheadle had already downed the contents of her glass. She went for a refill.

“How’s the Association doing?” Pariston asked. “Been running a bit of a police state there, Cheadle, haven’t you?” He whispered as if what he said ought to remain a secret, as if he was the only person privy to it.

She gritted her teeth but her face remained impassive. “Maybe you should stop watching too much TV.”

His shoulders rose in a defeated shrug. “What can I say, you haven’t left me much else.” He tilted his head and regarded her with a small smile, holding up his wine glass against his lower lip. “There’s only so much that books can tell you, don’t you agree?”

“News broadcasts don’t have access to any valuable information about the Association,” Cheadle said, trapping the bitter taste of her first wine against the roof of her mouth before swallowing. “So I’m not certain how much truth you can glean out of them.”

“I’ll take what I can get.” Pariston said. “Besides, speculation is just so much fun; I’ve always wondered if your authoritarian tendencies were just a figment of my imagination. It’s certainly more interesting than whatever placid thing you would’ve had going.” 

Cheadle glared at him. “Why don’t you just say what you think, Pariston?”

“Do you think Chairman Netero is happy?”

Oh. That card he loved to pull. “Dead people don’t have feelings.”

“But you think about it.”

“I don’t.” Cheadle lied, watching the last of her wine pool in the bottom of the glass like sediment. “His was a different era. We live in a far more sinister world than the one he left, and I’m only trying to adapt.”

“I can tell,” Pariston said, taking the bottle to refill her glass. “You’ve become shrewder, more vicious, just like him. But not to the same ends.”

“I’ve only become more pragmatic.” Cheadle stared at her glass, the liquid inside it still wheeling along its walls. “Netero’s ways and methods no longer matter.”

Cheadle could tell that stripping Isaac Netero of his title gave Pariston a stop—and done by her, of all people. He regarded her curiously for a moment then leaned back in his chair, uncharacteristically silent.

Why was she conversing with him? She owed him absolutely nothing—no information, no insight, not even the simple pleasure of casual conversation. He was a criminal, a part of her mind duly reminded her, _and you aren’t treating him as such_ , it added. But there’s more to it, she retorted; he has to come because she wanted to know why he has to come, and knew that if he hated her truly he will say yes, because, against that want of hers, she loathed the idea of him being anywhere except imprisoned here, and he knew that well enough. 

“It’s my turn to choose the wine, don’t you think?” Pariston said, was about to stand up then slammed back on the chair almost instantly and clapped his hands. “Let’s play a guessing game! You circle the shelves, and you have to guess which wine I’m thinking about, and each time you get it wrong I take three step closer to you, and if I touch you, you lose.”

Cheadle twisted her mouth. “That’s a bit rigged. I can know which wine you’re thinking about, but you can just as well lie to me.”

“Well, wouldn’t you like to know if I’m still good at it?”

“I don’t need to know, Pariston.”

He slumped back with a boyish pout. “You’re still so strict.”

“And you’re still insufferable.”

Light flickered in Pariston’s eyes. “What if I raise the stakes?” He stared at her with a wide smile. “If you win, I will go with you to the Dark Continent. On your terms. No questions.”

She stared at him for a moment. “And if I lose?”

“Nothing!” Pariston laughed. “The world just goes on as it is, but I suppose that’s the most awful of all things, no?”

Cheadle stood up. “Fine. Any clues?”

“For you, yes. But only three, and I’ll do to you as you did to me, victim to nostalgia.” He smiled. “One: adolescence.”

He was born on October 20th, 1974, on the island of Gutedel, an overseas territory that was once under the mandate of Caledonia, a country that neighbored her own, one enjoying the lucky fruits of a better geography and a kinder climate. She found it weird, how they were born so near each other, only two years apart, and grew up during the short intermediary periods of wars and conflicts undergone by their respective nations. Wars preceded and followed them, but they did not live them, had the privilege of existing far away from war zones and trench lines. She lived in the countryside of a misty town, farthest away from the borders, while he left his birth island just before the eruption of a liberation movement, taken by his family back to the country’s capital. 

But, childhood. They were on an island but it did not have to be a fortified wine; affluent colonial families enjoyed regular acquisition of different varieties from outside the island, yet the island itself wasn’t without worthy produce, so for all she knew, Pariston could have loved either. It could be _Margnat_ _Vosné_ , but it could also be _Pinot Dureza_ , the two most widely known products of the island, much less known nowadays, light and fruity varieties that would have appealed to a teen sneaking their first taste of alcohol. Or perhaps it was a simple but expensive rosé, imported, _Sauvignon Nuit_ or _Sance Gris_. She suspected that it might also be a wine made in large quantities and for immediate consumption, meant primarily as army imports, not necessarily of low quality but not one made for cellaring. However, it would have been one that could withstand the heat of Gutedel and still taste fine. Something summery, bucolic, even. Her hand finally settled on one.

“ _Domaine Silo_?” 

Pariston clicked his tongue. “No, but a perfectly logical choice.”

A grimace suppressed behind a controlled expression, she watched him get up from his chair and take exactly three steps towards her, large and leisurely, like he was measuring the floor’s width by foot.

“Second clue: summer.”

White wine then, probably, and if so then it was most definitely not produced in Gutedel, which only had red wine varieties. Pariston loved white wine, she knew that, at least.

Her eyes surveyed the shelves, and she walked closer to the racks lining the back end of the cellar, pulling out one bottle after the other only to return them, unsatisfied with the educated guesses her brain conjured, Pariston following her every step, maintaining the exact same distance between them.

_Loire Blanc_ , it could be, or _Chardonnay Galet_. Neither.

“ _Sweis Magritte_?” 

“My mother’s favorite! But wrong yet again.” Pariston hummed in disappointment. “Although we should drink it, it’s delicious. I almost forgot about its existence.”

Their eyes met as she turned around to face him, chest constricted, growing annoyed with this game. He smiled at her, moving three steps closer. “I’ll give you a bottle to take with you. I have a feeling you’ll like it.”

One more chance left.

He could be lying. No, he was most definitely peddling a lie somewhere, and Cheadle had learned a long time ago to stop searching for it, because it didn’t matter whether it existed or not, whether she discovered it or not. She also knew that she could win this and Pariston might still not come with her, but she had faith in one small thing: he had more to lose by remaining here than she did. She could always leave him here to rot for the rest of his life, but knowing that made her question why she had agreed to play this in the first place. Did she not want him to stay here? Wasn’t it always her dream to bring him to justice and lock him away?

He was close to her now, one more wrong answer and he will trap her against the wall.

“Just give me the third clue.”

“Cheadle.”

“What?”

“This is the third clue. Cheadle.”

She gritted her teeth. “What the hell?”

“What?” Pariston chuckled. “It’s the easiest clue.”

During childhood, Cheadle enjoyed tracing maps. Along some of those maps she had circled all the places where her name appeared. They were few, because it wasn’t a common name, and because it belonged more to trees than towns. She was born during years where the name _Cheadle_ was enjoying a resurgence of sorts, mostly as a boy’s name, and only after the massive, destructive fire that devoured the sprawling Cheadle Forests, the happenstance after which she was named, in commemoration, because that’s what politicians did, naming their newborn children after national tragedies.

Cheadle, as the forests. Cheadle, as the town in Berkdire, Manchess. Cheadle, the garden, named after her. Cheadle, as herself.

At that she stopped. Had they ever drank wine together? They attended the same parties and hung out around similar bars, and had sat together at a couple, even, but all that came to mind were images of him, beside her on a high stool, ordering her a drink like the one he held in his hand, but not the drink itself. What was it? She stared at him, and he stared back with a mild smile, still awaiting her answer.

“ _W_ _es Vitis_?”

Pariston took three steps closer.

He towered over her, blocking the overhanging light with his stature, drowning her in shadows, looking down at her while stretching his arm out, his hand reaching for something just behind her head, his knuckles brushing against her ear as they pulled out a bottle from the rack, glass dragging across wood.

“ ** _Finé_ ** _Vitis_.” He said. “You were looking at it. Why didn’t you pick it?”

Cheadle ignored his question. “Step away from me.”

“Don’t be a sore loser now.”

He stepped closer, bottle still in hand, still the only thing between them.

Little by little, Pariston pinned her against the wall of shelves. It was suddenly so dark and despite eliminating almost all distance between them, she sensed him still approaching.

Why did she suddenly fear him? He was nenless, he was powerless against her, there’s nothing he can do to hurt her.

Why was he scary? Why did she feel his killing intent as if it was coming from within her, from the deep recesses of her memory, from the monitor that burned a ring around her ankle?

His face, devoured by shadows, inched closer to hers, down, down so that his dark brown eyes were entirely black, and then he gently poked her forehead. “I will go with you,” he whispered. “I don’t want anything in return. Nothing that ever belonged to you, anyway.”

“What do you want?” Cheadle asked, knowing the answer.

“My nen.”

**III**


	2. How to Disappear

Pariston had not slept.

Quietly, sitting beside the window of his room, sharply aware of his breathing, he watched a timid, lovely blue sunrise spread across the horizon. Beside him was a traveling bag.

In the long stream of thoughts he was having, in one of the quietest corners of his mind, he wondered who is going to take care of his garden once he leaves.

He could see it, under the window, immaculately landscaped and tended, the green of it a dark, muddy blue in the first minutes of light, the colorful flowers pale, some drooping, still asleep, others perky only because of the dissipating darkness. He had come to care about it in a way that he rarely cared about living things which did not directly give anything in return. They were aesthetically pleasing, but he had no use for them beyond sensual pleasure, yet he hoped for them to thrive in his absence. With the sunrise he went out to the garden, fully dressed, and watered them.

As for the rest of the villa he did not care much. It had very little of interest to him, and besides clothes and personal items and some wine and the book he was currently reading, Pariston was going to abandon everything. He had spent the last couple days laying ceremonial white shrouds over his furniture, his books, the gallery and the music room, the office and the salon. It all sat, surrounding him silently, faceless, voiceless, object ghosts and ghosts of objects.

While his hands worked on cleaning and packaging and covering, he wondered about why he had kept so many things, about the history of all that existed with him for years in this place. So many were gifts, and it didn’t surprise him that he remembered every single one of those people with their offerings and presents.

Dousing a flowerbed in water, Pariston thought of how he felt no attachment to any of it. The whole villa could crumble in a raging fire right now and he wouldn’t feel anything. Was it the way it has become a prison or was it the sheer unfulfillment of living alone with countless objects destined to perish; was there a difference?

Pariston was living in a status symbol, surrounded by other, smaller status symbols, and he had built a home, or several, upon all the bodies he’d left behind.

He smiled up at the blooming purple bougainvillea that twisted over wooden beams, its paper flowers lighting up as the sun rose behind them, as a cold wind blew past, plucking some of the fragile flowers off their branches, scattering them about the garden floor.

The idea was so bizarre and instantaneous that it made him laugh. To become a plant. To be devoid of everything but effortless beauty, but he knew that not even plants were effortless, that not all were beautiful. There was a need in everything, and Pariston didn’t need anything. Pariston only wanted. 

Another gust of wind blew away more paper flowers, and this time he caught one, didn’t close his fingers around it knowing it would crumple if he did, instead kept his palm open, contorted his fingers ever so slightly to bar it from sudden flight, lifted his face to catch the cool warmth of the rising sun on his skin.

The gardenias and roses and the lemon trees and the sweetgrass and the blue fescues all shook around him, swayed and straggled. The shackles around his ankle felt heavy. 

For what will be the last time in his life, Pariston made coffee and sat in his garden, reading.

**III**

Under the pergola he stood, watching Cheadle pull over in his driveway in her small gray car. They were only separated by a gate that he had not crossed in a lifetime. It wasn’t something he could open. 

“Good morning,” he greeted her from behind the carved metal bars, waited for her to exit the car and come open the gate for him.

She looked exhausted but determined, stepping out of the car and walking towards him. He knew she drove for hours to get here, had nothing on her, it seemed, but the clothes she wore, perhaps the most practical outfit he’d ever seen her wearing. Cheadle in pants. It was delightful.

For a second, his heart jumped. As her fingers worked through the nen-locked gate Pariston felt ill. His stomach turned. They were still on his property, he was still in his prison, but it seemed to him as if the world was slowly unfurling before him, once again open and possible.

“Are you ready?” She asked, pulling the gate all the way through, and its old hinges squeaked and the gravel under it crackled like firewood and the metal bars rumbled.

Pariston didn’t know if he was. For a moment the world was a block of ice that didn’t let him through, so he stood frozen before it, having reached a strange border, one that was invisible and fragile and all too easy to cross, yet he couldn’t cross it. He was a newborn deer, a small creature struggling to stand up in the grass.

What a daze, he thought, and smiled. “I’m ready.”

Cheadle eyed his suitcase. “Why all the luggage?”

He chuckled. “A good fashion sense goes a long way in making the world less barbaric, no?” 

“Sure,” she rolled her eyes. “Get in the car now, will you.”

“Yes ma’am,” Pariston picked up his suitcase and placed it in the backseat, then rounded the car to sit in the passenger seat next to Cheadle.

Silence fell as she closed the door behind her. He took a moment to adjust to the scent of her all around him. It’s been years; it was terribly predictable that she still rode the same car, but again, it was the kind of reliable object that Cheadle cherished and would feel bad for replacing. Pariston felt like he was wearing one of her coats, not his style and a little too small but not entirely unpleasant. 

“You have everything you need with you?” Cheadle asked. “Once we’re at the port we won’t be coming back for anything.”

He looked at her and nodded. “I’m all set.”

Out of the driveway, the car sped past tall, ancient pine trees. Pariston rolled down the window, reclined his head back, took a long breath, filled his lungs with rarified air, with the scent of old things renewed, with the history of the place.

He told Cheadle about the old residents of every mansion they passed; about the Muscovies and their talented twin sons, the architectural advice he offered them about their turret attics; about the Allenis’ girl who was always in her room, the time he accidentally—but not really—spilled wine on their sofa; about the massive willow in the Pipmans’ chateau. She didn’t reply to any of it except with intermittent hums, and halfway through he realized that he was mostly recounting those tales to himself.

His neighbors were not exceptionally interesting people, but Pariston has a propensity for finding all kinds of people fascinating, an aptness for wheedling himself within all sorts of communities, and he was perfectly placed among those families. They were wealthy, affluent, cultured, and apathetic—like himself, he believed—but they did not know that he was a Hunter. It did not matter if they did, so he never told them, and besides, it was always much more fun when people thought that you’re like them in every way. It made him palatable, lovable, even, he dared think, and they enjoyed the existence of the obscurely rich, one that made their secrets few and far between. The earth under their feet was shallow, and whenever he finished digging for filth only to find none mucky enough, he simply created some. They were decent, respectable entertainment. How unfortunate, to be gone like this.

By the time the car exited Langres, he realized that none of his attempts at casual conversation were going to persuade Cheadle to pay attention to him. She was focused on the road ahead, completely silent, almost unblinking. What was she thinking about, he wondered. Besides cursory information about their travel plans, she said nothing to him during the past couple of days.

Pariston stared long at her, a part of him trying to reassemble old images in his head, bring her back not from the present but the distant past, as she was on the day he first saw her, which wasn’t the same day as their first meeting.

He knew her before she knew him, learned of a Cheadle Yorkshire—then nameless to him—in a dingy hospital after an almost fatal insect bite, in a country that’s no longer a country and a room that was barely anything besides four walls. On a bed he had glimpsed her, he a new Hunter fresh off his exam wandering in search of anything and nothing, she in a place she shouldn’t be, clutching her injured arm with solemn determination, knew more than the doctor trying to treat her but deferred to him anyway, in the manner of opinionated but agreeable children battling to utter their protests but ultimately choosing to remain obedient. She didn’t notice him, then, while he was lurking behind the ajar door, or perhaps she did, or perhaps he wasn’t there at all to begin with, perhaps he saw her first somewhere else entirely. 

Memory had begun to fail him, he believed. At times it was sharp in a specific way that irritated him, because the details it brought up were wildly, almost purposefully unimportant. His memory had a mind of its own, refused to serve him when he most needed it, was distant and muddy when he tried to conjure certain parts of the past. Were ten years enough to annihilate his once-unparalleled capacity for memorization and recollection? In the past his ability to store almost all surrounding details verged on a cosmic curse.

In his prison Pariston had no targets to categorize and nothing of importance of which to keep track. Days passed similarly and at times did not pass at all. Rooms became cells and the TV was galactic static. He swore once he was in a time loop. Not even he could escape these things, which surprised him years ago, once he realized it and accepted it.

He was as susceptible to damage and dementia and decay as the best of them, as susceptible to indifference, which he loathed. Yet, he did not kill himself. He did fantasize about ending his life but they were mostly the stuff of fancy, more a movie reel than legitimate plans, more out of sheer boredom and existential inertia than suicidality. He did not want to die, except at times he did. Later he recalled that he simply wished to die on his own terms. Killing himself within the confines of his prison would have been an outcome that Cheadle expected and perhaps desired. To get rid of him without bloodying her own hands with him. He understood that, so he refused to die out of desperation, and he was struck by just how desperate he became at times, by the heights of solipsism that one reaches in isolation. He had no purpose, and after that came to realize that his whole life had moved without a great purpose, something bigger than himself. Everything was always replaceable to him, people and objects and plans alike. If one fails he acquired ten, if few died he gathered around him more, and success did not matter because success was boring, and he knew that because he had succeeded more often than he wanted.

It was a world of means to him, and he functioned best in the throes of chaos and uncertainty—and perhaps, he thought now as he thought in the past—this was the best of Cheadle’s revenge, to have robbed him of that, to have condemned him to the mundane and the predictable of forced domesticity, to make him realize that he did not exist without those who perceived him.

He had dulled, but one can still hammer a skull with a dumb tool.

“Can we put on some music?”

“No.”

How did she see him for the first time? He wondered as he looked at her, the shine of her hair locks under the morning sun a pretty sight. Did she also catch him—accidently, discreetly, without being seen—in a moment of pain and loneliness? Was she truly feeling those things back then or was he just projecting on her? She appeared lost and ridden with guilt, then, clutching the damaged evidence of some transgression or another, a thing he supposed was still there, still where he’d last seen it.

His eyes wandered to her right arm to see it, to seek the threads of that memory, but her long sleeves barred him from the hidden scars. 

“What are you looking at?”

“Nothing, I love your shirt.” He answered. “Is it going to be hot in there?”

“Where we’re landing, yes.”

Pariston glanced outside the window. “The weather there has always been unpredictable.”

Now they were nearing the city but he knew she wasn’t going to take him there. She was going to skirt the edges of it, avoid its passages and drive them to the port right away. For a moment he considered asking her to drive him around, to let him see the city again because he loved it. Did it still exist as he remembered it? He knew that the past doesn’t exist, that everything now belongs to other people, to strangers; that now, he owned nothing but himself. If he and the city were to look at each other, they would be strangers.

“You’re going to be piloting the seaplane?”

“Yes.”

“Is it safe?”

“Yes.”

He hummed, watching the concrete road under the car wheels turn into endless stretches of gray ribbons. “The sea levels have been rising.”

“You think you’re going to drown?”

Pariston chuckled. “I hope not.” He caught her gaze, finally, when she glanced at him from the corner of her eye. “I trust you to get us there safely.”

“I can’t promise anything.” She said with a familiar kind of seriousness. “We’re going to be crossing turbulent waters for five days, maybe even more than a week if the weather is unfavorable.”

“What’s the worst case scenario?”

Surprisingly, she chuckled. “You’d love to know, wouldn’t you?” He smiled at the way she side-eyed him. “Worst case scenario, the seaplane malfunctions, we run out of fuel and become stranded at ocean, surrounded by nothing but undrinkable water. We would send for help but there would be no signals, perhaps we catch some disease or another, but more likely after three weeks our food and water will run out and in a desperate fit of hunger, dehydration, and complete dissolution of my dignity, I eat you alive.”

He laughed. “Honestly, I thought you’ll say you’d throw me off the board.”

“That, too.”

“I have a feeling it will be a great trip.” Pariston asserted. “Besides, you and I never went on trips together, barely even went on missions. How many, do you remember?”

“No.”

“I do,” he said. “Two.”

“Is that so?”

“Yep. One in Yelvin, when Chairman Netero sent us to negotiate with the local government over disputed territory, and the other in Kanawa in the desert, where I suffered a sunstroke and you saved my life.”

Cheadle snorted. “What a blunder that was, on my part.”

“Oh well,” he smiled. “We all gotta live with our mistakes, no?”

To that she gave no reply. Pariston knew that she needed no reminders of those missions, that she most likely remembered them better than he did, through her own eyes and her own reasoning.

They had never gotten along, not since their first handshake as fellow Hunters. She had a good nose for bullshit, a nose sharper than most, and with one glance from her he knew she detested him; not him, specifically, but people like him, what he represented, how his ilk came to be, perhaps more so because the two of them had hatched from similar eggs and she could tell that. She could tell that he was closer to her past than she’d ever like anyone to be. He carried with him something from what she could have been, from what she was meant to be.

The child of inherited glory, undone.

“Got something we could eat?” He asked her, glancing at the backseat, wondering if the bags there were food.

“Sure,” she said, pointing to the white bags he was looking at. “Didn’t eat your breakfast?”

Pariston twisted his torso awkwardly to reach the food in the back, pulling the bag towards him then onto his lap, unknotting it to see its contents. “I usually wake up hungry, but today was different.” He pulled a wrapped sandwich out and smiled at her. “Guess I’m just antsy. Want some?”

She shook her head.

“You made them?”

Another headshake. Again with the noncommittal replies. Pariston sighed and began eating, deciding once again to just stare out the window, take everything in, and then remembered something that had wandered in his mind intermittently ever since she mentioned it. “Do you think I’d make a good nurse?”

“No.”

A laughter burst out of his chest. “I think so too.”

“You’ll be competent enough, I imagine.” Cheadle said. “The patients there are probably going to be too ill to think of how pathologically lacking in empathy you are.”

“That’s what you think of me?”

“I’m being charitable.”

“Of course.” Pariston nodded. “Want some of the cookies I made?”

“Sure,”

He opened the tin box sitting between his feet, picked one with a lot of chocolate chips on it and held it against her mouth. “Open up,” he sang, reveling in the glare she tossed him.

“I can feed myself, thank you.” She growled, snatching the cookie out of his hand and taking a large, angry bite out of it. Pariston watched her chew on it, watched as a spark of light made her eyes brighter for a moment. He decided to take her utter silence as praise for his evolved baking skills, inching his fingers close to her mouth to brush a bit of chocolate that got stuck on her lower lip. Soft, he thought.

Her shoulders tensed instantly against his touch, and he imagined that if he still had his nen about him he’d be able to see her aura flaring larger as her body shrank away from him. As far as the driving seat would allow her, Cheadle recoiled away with her whole being. He was repulsive to her, almost like a disease, her reaction to his physical proximity almost instinctual, like he’s the same predator that chased down every single one of her ancient ancestors.

“Do that again and I will kill you, Pariston.” She hissed at him, feeling her aura whirling just above her skin, feeling the ankle monitor stinging her down to the bone, and hated how he elicited from her the exact reaction he desired. How susceptible she was still to the little annoyances he visited upon her; the unwanted, sudden touches and the purposeful verbal teases. She knew very well that he enjoyed her discomfort and that alone made her livid. When was she going to get better at his game?

“We’re getting close.” Pariston said, an external voice to her own thoughts as she watched the seascape expand right in front of her, her gaze wandering over the glimmering surface of the water, her heartbeat suddenly increasing.

She took a breath, didn’t have to wonder about what scared her, about the little fears that clung to her spine and the nape of her neck.

Once they boarded the seaplane, there was no going back. If she were to die in the ocean for whatever reason then she was going to die with Pariston, the last person on earth that she’d want to witness her death, if she was unfortunate enough to have witnesses. That was her motivation to make it through the sea trip successfully. 

Down at the seaport, their seaplane was floating alone beside the dock, white and red and flagrantly emblazoned with the Association’s insignia. Cheadle stood on the creaking wood, looking out at the ocean, at the way it extended, hearing Pariston take a long breath beside her.

“Can we stand here for a moment?” He asked, a bit out of breath, a bit in awe, his eyes affixed to the view. “I haven’t seen the ocean in a while.”

Cheadle stared at him for a minute, at his moment out of captivity, as if he’s only just now believed for good that he’s out of his villa. She sighed but the sound of it was lost to the waves, and perhaps he’d heard her or perhaps he didn’t, and either way he didn’t look and she didn’t say anything, turned her head to watch light flakes dip in and out of the water, caught a small boat floating in the far distance, a silhouette against the bright sky. She thought of the sky seemingly flat above the ocean, rounding over it like a hand, cupping, the blue of both almost mending into one.

Tip of his feet inching over the dock, Pariston smiled, the blond locks over his eyes fluttering with the breeze. “I hope Ging is waiting for us.”

She was hoping for the same thing, but she didn’t tell him.

The breeze ran between her fingers, at the length of her jaw, at the opening in her collar. Somewhere in her chest, the dread settled if only for a little bit, and although her heart beat wildly—in anticipation of things she knew and things she didn’t—nothing today, she thought, had business being this beautiful. The peace of it was almost sinister.

Pariston finally looked at her, somber, one hand grabbing his upper arm in a vulnerable gesture. “Are you and I idiots for going?”

“Probably.”

“I’m excited.”

So was she, but she didn’t tell him, didn’t have to. He already knew.

**III**

Pariston’s eyes wandered over the surface of the sea, dimming, staring at the blue, molten lead that stretched under the night sky, under his eyes. The seaplane was moving quickly, on autopilot, Cheadle going through their packages and luggage, checking everything and rechecking because she was neurotic and because she didn’t want to sit silently and be forced to engage with him in any capacity. He admired her tenacity and sheer stubbornness in that regard. If she so wanted they could go through this whole trip without exchanging a single word. He could annoy her, he thought, and still not make her talk.

The moon was invisible that night, which bored him. At times, looking down from the small window in this little metal tube, he couldn’t tell the height at which they were flying, at times they seemed simply suspended in place, the engines whirring uselessly around them.

At one point he had just whipped his book out and lay down on his bed to read, waiting to fall asleep, or for the night to end, or for Cheadle to talk with him. None happened. His brain as well seemed perversely averse to planning—it, too, in a state of suspension, and he had to admit to himself that he didn’t have much on which to build a plan, and Cheadle appeared quite determined to make as much noise as she could.

Meanwhile, Mandango was falling in love with a peasant girl whom Pariston already predicted would betray the protagonist of this novel. His dearest friend, one Zweil, had warned the spunky lad, but Mandango’s whole shtick was that he was an idiot who always somehow managed to get himself out of sticky situations in surprising ways, surprising enough that it kept Pariston, an almost forty year old man—a fact which he loathed—reading.

That thought made him turn the book around to see the intended ages on the cover. 13-17. He laughed.

“Cheadle,” he called for her, waiting for the noises of decluttering and cluttering to stop. They did. “What’s your favorite novel?”

She stopped, a folder between her hands, and seemed to take a minute too long to reply to a question with an answer she already knew, as if she was making absolutely sure that the title which must be dwelling in her head right now _was_ , indeed, her favorite novel, or maybe she’ll just deny him the information and was pondering some sort of rebuke.

After a moment, she answered with nonchalant confidence. “Twenty Days to Ashkara.” 

“The one by Joan Ian?” Pariston asked, recalling the bright orange cover of the novel, iconic by now, often confused with another, lesser book. There was a hint of surprise in his voice. The book was a classic, but it wasn’t something he imagined someone like Cheadle would love. It was, after all, populated by petty characters walking steadfastly towards their ruin, or perhaps she loved it precisely for those reasons, to indulge in chaos without being touched by it, but then that thought struck him as quite pedestrian for a Hunter, so he thought there must be other reasons.

“Why?”

Cheadle shrugged, turned around to place the folder back in one of the packages. “I don’t know, I suppose I read it at a formative age when I was still too young to read it.”

“Those are always the best, no?” He smiled. “I remember reading it when I was in high school, found it boring but then I gained a new-found appreciation for it. It’s a good choice.”

Does he tell her his favorite or does he wait for her to ask, and she might never ask but after realizing that there were no more packages to attend to and that she was alone with him on a seaplane flying towards a deathtrap, she offered the question.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I never had a favorite book.” Pariston looked down at the cover of Mandango, at the drawing of a man in a cape and a damsel in distress. “I like the early works of Samzi Kerna but they’re considered quite outdated by now, right?”

“Right.” She gave him a face at which he laughed.

“Yeah, I know, but they were important when I read them.” Then he side-eyed her, playfully, challengingly, egging her to engage with him. “But at least his stories don’t end with a woman killing her children.”

“The filicide is symbolic.” She retorted, squaring her shoulders.

Pariston hummed. “I had a feeling you were gonna say that.” 

Her eyes narrowed. “Because you’re trying to put me on the defensive.”

“Not at all, but you’re already being defensive about it.”

Cheadle turned away from him, done with the conversation, but Pariston still wanted to talk.

“I have to admit, though,” he started. “Never took you for an edgy teen.”

That made her scoff. “I don’t need you to take me for anything.”

“Of course, but it’s still amusing to know you’ve occasionally done things you weren’t supposed to do. But again,” he stopped, laying back on the bed, staring at her turned back. “The uniformly obedient never become Hunters. Never good ones, anyway.” 

And as they always do, his back-handed compliment left her tight-jawed and simmering in silence. She said nothing.

Cheadle had failed her first Hunter Exam, so did he, only he did it intentionally, and only because he—then eighteen with much money to his name and fantastical ideas about death—knew that he wanted one person to pass him, one person who was not present then for long and did not care to be.

Isaac Netero was always an old man, back then and just before he went to his death, and in his heart Pariston sought the man’s attention and desired his validation above everything else. No one there seemed to matter, particularly, despite the fact that any of the senior examiners could kill him in ways that matched his age in number and his spirit in cruelty. No. The ability to kill efficiently was never a hallmark of anything to him, any low-tier Hunter could kill. Killing was the easy stuff—it was the long game Pariston loved.

In the end, he got what he wanted. Netero did not only pass him but praised him, directly, the twinkle of promise in his eyes, as if even back then he knew Pariston was going to become big and important, yet intentionally held back on the things he knew Pariston wished to hear from him the most. It’s what he always did; give with one hand, take with the other.

There was a bit of silliness to it all, a silliness of such grandeur and allure that Pariston spent the next decade of his life pursuing it, leisurely, indulgently, because he had all the time in the world. He always believed that, even if all the time in the world meant he was going to die tomorrow, or next year. The moment as it is was always all the time he needed for anything. That had changed, he thought, but not in radical ways.

The weight of that old hand on his young shoulder still felt heavy almost two decades later, even heavier, intentionally weighing him down to see if he could hold it up, hold up all the history that followed it.

He rolled his shoulders, put the book down, decided to go to sleep. At such moments he used to feel his nen. He no longer did. With eyes closed, he spoke to Cheadle, envisioning behind his eyelids the soft rise and fall of her chest. “Do you think twenty is too old to take the Hunter Exam?”

“I believe it’s the right age.” Cheadle replied.

“Yeah but is it too old?” He insisted. “Didn’t you take yours at sixteen?”

“I did.” And after a moment she added, “But today, sixteen-year-olds won’t be admitted into the exam.”

“You were lucky then.”

She scoffed. “Of course.”

“You implemented that policy?”

“Yes.”

Behind his eyes, Pariston allowed for the sudden deluge of memories to flood his mind; memories of himself, of his decision to take the exam, of why, of when. It was November but in his mind it was summer. “I think sixteen-year-old me would have died in the first phase of the exam. I’m sure of it.” He threw her a glance. “You must’ve been so competent to survive it twice, and pass.”

To that she said nothing, and so he closed his eyes again and asked her when they were going to arrive.

“Tomorrow.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow then.”

 _A fragile sunflower_ , he remembered with a voice not his own. What an old memory, now, a part of him quietly, sincerely glad that it had not evaporated into something he couldn’t grasp. To that, he slept.

**III**


	3. The Land of Plenty

They had not stepped foot in this place for more than a decade, and never on this particular shore. Before them stood mounds of black rocks and beyond them a stretch of ominous, jagged trees that obscured the horizon.

Rocking gently above the waves, the seaplane floated behind them, its bright white surface desolate in the drab scenery around it. Cheadle and Pariston stood in place, too, foreign and small and a little lost in the midst of things that were yet to happen but which they both felt strongly.

Everything in front of them appeared as a fort, a castle that had fallen into ruin, its stones scattered about, some tumbling down into the shore and the water, and they, two tourists who had stumbled onto the wrong island resort.

“You said a car will be waiting for us?” Pariston asked, and even to his own ears his voice sounded distant, and the idea of a car in this place anachronistic.

Cheadle nodded. “There’s a road here, across the rocks and above. The car will be waiting a little ahead.”

Hauling their luggage and packages over the rocks and up to the road was a daunting task, done completely in silence as one burden moved from one pair of hands to another. Some of the rocks were slippery and Pariston could smell humidity everywhere, could feel it between the finest hairs on his head, the way it clung to his skin, the way it called on for his old headaches, and for a moment, as they finally set foot on a relatively flat surface, he contemplated the possibility that nobody will come to pick them up. What would they do, if that was the case?

And then they heard it. Footsteps over wet soil, a rustling, and a moment later a short, stout man appeared. He waved to them from afar, and perhaps because of the distance, or the hesitation in Cheadle’s feet, or the smallness of being human in this place, his presence seemed jarring and unreal.

The three met halfway.

“Doctor Yorkshire, I believe?” The man said, a little flushed, his fluttery, nervous gray eyes regarding Pariston after he asked the question before settling back on Cheadle.

Gloved, she took the hand he offered. “Markov Golkin?”

“Yes.”

“A pleasure.” She said, then gestured with a hand to Pariston. “That’s Pariston Hill, my assistant.”

“Welcome here,” Markov nodded in acknowledgment but did not shake his hand. “The car is a little bit ahead, please follow me.”

He helped with carrying their luggage and moved ahead of them so that they saw no glimpse of his face until they reached the car. Inside it was another person, a blond man sitting behind the wheel, gazing from the side mirror at them, and as they approached him he stepped out and began handling the bags. He was silent and gave his name out like it was a chore. _Twen_ , he said, with a cold demeanor.

The car was a dark green military pickup that runs on solar power, and Cheadle could hear the sound of its engine before it even started. These cars were not part of funding, but leftovers from years past, when conflicts were still erupting on the continent. They were prone to damage but easy to fix. She wondered how many of them they had and was answered quickly.

“It’s the only operating car we have at the moment,” Markov ventured as they slid inside and he took his place beside Twen who started revving the engine. “The settlement is nearby, so the journey won’t be too long. We’ll arrive there soon.” He said with the awkwardness of someone who knew nobody in this car wanted to be in it.

Cheadle rained the two men with an endless parade of questions, from weather patterns and water treatment to the state of crops cultivation and the functioning of the satellite stations. Everything was answered with a dour, serious tone interspersed with nervous chuckles. Twen, the driver, remained completely silent throughout, his icy blue gaze assessing Pariston from the rearview mirror. Pariston smiled cordially, staring back at the sharp, disembodied eyes, and only looked away when Twen did.

Roads and pathways have been charted along the forest, and this side was, purportedly, the safest in the continent and the most capable of accommodating human inhabitants, and yet barely, if the words of this scientist had anything to reveal.

The farcicality of attempting to make a life here—with expendable souls, of course—was never lost on Pariston, for as soon as they had arrived on it years and years ago, it proved quite quickly and violently how resistant it was to the human hand. This knowledge hung heavy over everyone in the car, and nobody opened their mouth for a long while after that.

Cheadle especially did not move or emote, in her own head after her questions dried up, her eyes stayed fixed at the blurry chain of trees outside, and then her wooden expression was slightly moved by a strange insect that landed on her arm. The little creature flicked its translucent, oval wings, and settled low on her skin. She became even more still, watching the insect turn around among thin hairs, and perhaps a little too late she made to catch it, failing when the car rumbled and sputtered suddenly and all of them flew a bit over their seats.

When Cheadle lifted and turned her hand, the insect was flattened dead against her palm. She inspected it for a moment, then wiped it off her skin against the dull edge of the lowered window glass.

Pariston scratched his knuckles, grossed out and intrigued, and because for a long moment nobody said anything, he chanced a question about Ging. Cheadle was looking outside the window but her ears were with them.

“Freecs?” Markov asked naively, as if there could have been any other Ging in this place. “He’s actually come down to the settlement in the past, but nobody has heard anything of him for years.” He said, moving his eyes between the two of them. “He’s a sworn hermit, that man.”

Pariston hummed, delighted. “And I assume no one knows where he is right now?”

“No, not even in the past, really.” Markov said, grabbing the seat headrest and lowering his head when the truck bumped up violently over rough terrain. “I wonder if he’s even still alive. Outside the settlement borders, anything goes.”

A shared, unvoiced scoff sat at the back of their throats. Ging wasn’t dead, for sure. At least his letter suggested he wasn’t. Quietly, Cheadle wondered how he’d snuck his secret message inside the digital report if he hadn’t, as Markov claimed, come down to the settlement in years. Did he have an informant inside? It was likely; he tended to make acquaintances everywhere. Or did he sneak in without being seen and tamper with the report, and if so how did he know that one was being sent? Did he know about the infection? Does he have a way of knowing they arrived? Should they go looking for him or will he appear on his own?

She exchanged a look with Pariston. He seemed to be sharing her thoughts, and Twen was once again surveying them; his cold eyes poured into Pariston’s, perhaps trying to dig something out, some truth, some kind of observation, but Pariston only smiled in return, this time less friendly, less accommodating, colder and more threatening than the frigid stare trying to read him.

 _Don’t try us_ , it said. And as his eyes suggested, Twen was intelligent enough to finally avert his gaze and leave them alone.

The settlement borders were a reminder of the building’s original militaristic purposes. They stood high, graying and peeling and topped with thorny wire fences. The land around them was cleared of trees and led to a large metal gate, beyond which stood the settlement. Rows of small units were built on top of one another, wall to wall, so that the structure extended vertically, leaving a relatively large space for planting crops, some from mainland, few local, most hybrids. Plots of land on the continent were rarely fertile or supported wide scale agriculture, and to find and maintain one was a precious endeavor, and thus more space was allocated to plants than people.

Atop the square cubicles, at the highest point of the structure, was built a small watch tower, a dome that appeared as the only curved shape in the entire landscape.

It was not apparent until they became closer—the little, narrow alleyways and the tight staircases that were hardly more than precarious ledges molded into walls. And water on the ground. Puddles of it, thin trails, twinkling gray and blue.

“It rained heavily yesterday,” Markov informed them when he saw them looking. “But the insolation within the settlement has been excellent, so you don’t have to worry about getting wet inside.”

Pariston walked slowly, looking around, feeling eyes behind them, Twen still following them like a dissipating shadow, and eyes over them as they crossed the wet, serrated fields and reached the units, eyes that surveilled them from windows and walkways and roofs. He couldn’t make out any particular shapes, everyone seemed a little shy at their arrival.

“Excuse the poor welcoming,” Markov apologized. “As you’re well aware of the situation here, you might imagine what it’s like to see newcomers. Everybody is a little scared.”

And that last line was addressed to Cheadle, specifically, nervous but a tad confrontational, and one that she nonetheless ignored, opting to turn around to look at Twen who was still trailing behind them, light-footed. Her sudden acknowledgement of him made him stop, and his eyes flicked for a second, the only expression of apprehension he allowed himself.

“You’re a former soldier?” She asked him.

Twen spat on the ground, his body betraying his discomfort, and he answered without looking at her. “I’m leftovers, ma’am.”

She ignored his rude display of disdain, shifting her attention from him to Markov. “When can I see the patients?”

“Soon,” Markov said. “Let me take you up to your room first.”

“Will it be shared?” Pariston inquired, catching up with the two of them to walk beside Cheadle who appeared visibly discomfited by the prospect.

“Ah, yes.” Markov smiled awkwardly at them. “We were sadly uninformed that Doctor Yorkshire will have company. We believed she would come alone. I’ll see what can be done about—”

“There’s no need to do anything,” Cheadle interrupted him, smiling. “Thank you.” She even went as far as to put a hand on Pariston’s back, transferring her smile up to him. “It would be better to maintain close quarters with my assistant.”

“True,” Pariston’s eyes curved, feeling the flighty tips of her fingers brush against his vest. “I was thinking the same.”

And with that they were taken up to one of the higher units, a room bereft of everything but a bed, a dresser, and a small window that overlooked the fields below. There was a cut off corner for a lavatory and a washing basin, but no space for a shower. It was closer to a prison cell than a room, but Cheadle and Pariston uttered no complaints as they ushered their things inside, were assured that all large packages will be handled with care, and were finally afforded a moment of privacy before Markov’s promised return, who diligently and politely closed the door behind him.

At last the two looked each other in the eye. Cheadle was agitated, still holding a bag on her shoulder that she had kept on her person since they arrived, her hands gripping the straps like a kid on their first day of school. Faint sun light slanted into the room from the meager window to their left, making the perfectly square space seem even more desolate and barren. The sense that they were standing in a cage trickled into the room with the humid light from outside and the ceiling felt closer, like they could touch it if they lifted their arms high enough, and then the light dimmed, the walls grayed, shadows infested the room, crawling over the floor.

It remained unspoken, too, but both were waiting for those still standing behind the door to leave.

A moment passed and a cloud, and finally freeing herself from the load on her shoulders, Cheadle declared in a low growl: “He wanted to kill us.”

“Twen?” Pariston asked, chuckling. “He’s cute.” He stepped towards the bed and poked the mattress with a suspicious forefinger, leaning down and squinting his eyes. “He was assessing me with his eyes; I kind of thought he was flirting.”

She glared at him but he shrugged. Flirting or not, Cheadle had noticed the incessant staring as well, and in spite of Pariston being its target, the murderous intent was all directed towards her.

“He was trying to assess how much of a danger I posed.” Pariston said, more seriously, finally allowing himself to sit on the bed. She said nothing. “I don’t find it very strange, though. Do you?”

Cheadle walked towards the window and stood staring at the new world around her. Some figures had finally come out, two, three, five making their way towards an industrial well. Her hand felt the dusty, clay residue of the window bane brushing against her palm, eyes observing intently the people milling about the fields.

“We’ve barely arrived and already we have fans.” Pariston joked.

A scoff escaped her, doubtful and self-deprecating. She took her hand off the window bane and dusted it over her pants. “We better stay careful regardless. Our first priority is the patients.”

Pariston followed her with his eyes as she moved about the room, unpacking some stuff, sliding out a block of files from her bag to place it on the dresser with a loud thud, then opened the drawers one by one, found them empty, left them so, then to the bed where her gloved hand fell on the mattress, slapping a torrent of dust out of it. She stopped over it, hand clenched, and concluded aloud that aside from hygienic concerns, it was safe to sleep on, and then she seemed to realize that there was one bed and two of them.

When she gazed uncertain at him, Pariston assured her he’s willing to sleep on the floor, more interested in figuring out the mechanism behind her technique, the one she used to discern what was safe and what wasn’t, the one she used to analyze minute data, like what she’d tried to do back with the squished bug. He made no attempt to hide his curiosity, and she knew that he was interested in learning more, ignored him as one by one the fingers of her right hand slipped out of the glove.

At times like these, Pariston sorely missed his nen. Playing around with the limits of one’s aura was a great way of discovering the abilities of other nen users. The majority of Hunters look down on those who replicate other people’s techniques, but reverse engineering was an invaluable tool for learning. It took him a very long time, longer than most, and long after he mastered the basics, to develop techniques unique to himself. Hunters like Cheadle rarely relied on one affinity or one technique, and had a penchant for mixing several.

With that thought his eyes followed the invisible line from her right hand to her left foot, where her greatest pilfer was wrapped solid around her ankle. It would have looked so mundane if Pariston didn’t know what it was, what it did and still does to him. The shackles around his own right ankle stung him like cold, scratched metal, as it always did, when he was this close to her, or perhaps this close to his own imprisoned aura.

Was there weight to it? Did it make her own nen use less efficient? Did it hurt her?

She sighed. “I suppose we should start making ourselves comfortable here.”

Neither made a move to populate the cube they were going to share, but stood motionless, mentally circling each other, waiting and bored of waiting. They could open the door, they both thought. Open it to feel less stuck with the other, to feel less of the weight of their company that has begun to settle in, the weight of Cheadle remembering that she did not want him here but that she had brought him voluntarily, the importance of staying near each other, of acting as a team.

And as she deeply disliked his presence here so did some people dislike hers in this settlement. She knew that. Knew that perhaps the majority here had a bone to pick with her, and between the altruism of wanting to help and the selfishness of wanting to know Ging’s motivations, she stood near the door, unable to open it.

“Do you hear that sound?” Pariston asked, turning towards the walls.

How the room could fall even quieter Cheadle didn’t know, and in that dead quietude she could make out the sound—a gurgling, a rocky stream, like a choking. Both of them with ears to the wall, they listened to what sounded like sputtering water pipes. If they put a hand to the wall, they could even feel the vibrations of water moving.

“Sweetened sea water?”

“Yeah, from the treatment facility.”

There were very few fresh, drinkable water sources on the continent, at least for humans. The ones that existed upon mass human arrival quickly depleted due to rapid exploitation, and the ones remaining ranged from highly saline to outright toxic. Once it became clear that no human civilization could flourish here, plans to turn the continent into a giant, sprawling land for mining exotic resources were fought by the Association with every ounce of acumen it possessed. Catastrophes had already befallen the ecosystem here without further human aggravation, and spending years in international courts and conventions to preserve the land from further destruction constituted the bulk of Cheadle’s diplomatic work in the past decade.

“Doesn’t it just make you thirsty?” Pariston wondered quietly. “This sound.”

She swallowed, her saliva still tasted of the cold coffee she last drank on the seaplane before docking.

“What are you thinking about?”

His stature throwing a shadow over her, Cheadle looked up at her ‘assistant’. “When we get out of this room,” she began. “stay close to me, and don’t speak to anybody unless spoken to. Don’t arouse curiosity, and don’t ask about Ging again, even if he’s mentioned directly.”

Pariston sighed solemnly. “So many demands, you should’ve written me a script.”

She smirked. “Don’t tell me you’ve lost your ability to make up your own.”

“I don’t think I have, no.”

“Then act as necessary,” Cheadle said, standing up to her full height, sliding her hand off the wall. “It’s not a lie that I brought you with me as an assistant. You _are_ going to help me, and you’re going to learn how to do it fast.”

“Don’t they know who I am, or perhaps, more accurately, who I _was_ ?” Pariston inquired. “After all, I’m _still_ a convict. What would they think of you, having an international criminal tag along to help?”

“Every scientist here is an ‘undesirable’, as they are called. Some are convicts like you.” Cheadle answered him, watched surprise glint in his eyes before he put things together. “And I didn’t hide your identity, did I?” She looked at him pointedly. “Consider coming here to help me community service.”

His trial was not open to the public and was not even privately televised, and not even all Hunters knew the full extent of his crimes. Even today, what happened of Pariston Hill has remained a mystery to many in the Association, and there were those who had transformed the circumstances of his trial and indictment into a political cause and a policy issue. Even those who were no fans of his and found him guilty were conscientious objectors. Cheadle, to her own surprise, was stronger than that tide, and was well aware that the historical and political moment just so happened to be in her favor when the matter of re-elections was posed and discussed and eventually dismissed. Nobody wanted more international scrutiny.

She stood atop a polarized and divided Association, and had accumulated enough enemies to last her this lifetime and the next.

When Pariston handed her his license, there was something prescient in his eyes, as if he already knew all that would happen, had seen it and lived it and was just waiting for her to go through it all and catch up with him. Cheadle thought that what pissed her off most was how something about him always made her reckless, and she did act recklessly in every decision regarding him, even when she believed it was the right one.

His eyes circled the room, and then with wide steps he left the gurgling walls and walked briskly to the door, wrapping the shabby doorknob with his fingers. Once again, the figures behind the door moved too slowly. He opened it.

Perhaps the smile he beamed at them made them take a step back, or the fact that the hallway was dark and a cloud had moved outside to drench their room in light, or that he stood at the doorway so that he blocked them from seeing anything except his body, towering over them.

“I didn’t mean to startle you, I’m sorry.” Pariston said, still smiling, and opened the door fully only a little too late.

Cheadle had been on the other side of the door so many times, had Pariston stand over her like he did now, cordial and friendly in all the wrong ways, and could imagine how the three scientists who were entering their room now must have felt to be stared down by those eyes.

All gloved, all in lab coats, stood and stared, and seemed to finally, collectively, notice Cheadle’s presence. If they were a little shaken at being revealed before they were ready, they were now completely apprehensive, staring a little dumbfounded at the woman they called on for help, perhaps having imagined that she’d look anything but how she did now.

“Doctor Yorkshire,” the only woman among the three spoke up, struggled to not form her sentence into a question. Blonde and stern-faced, she took a step closer and extended a hand. Cheadle took it instantly, and it appeared, then, that the power imbalance settled over everyone, and Pariston could almost see the gears turning in their heads while he stood and watched them introduce themselves, and then he did the same.

Cheadle already knew all of them. She knew their names, their professions, their accomplishments, where they came from and where they studied, but they knew nothing of her besides a name, and a title, and some malformed grudges.

That was the thing with famous Hunters; they were famous within their own circles, and the majority of people, even civilians within their field, rarely knew them in person. Many Hunters lived and moved and conducted their business by reputation alone without ever having a public face, and some, like Cheadle, were already reclusive and introverted by nature, and becoming the chairman of the Association hadn’t changed that, it seemed.

Outside in the hallway, Sulei Fell, a biologist and the head of the research team, lead them in the opposite direction of where they came from, walking ahead side by side with Cheadle while Pariston occupied the middle row, feeling like a prisoner as the other two scientists strolled behind him. Sulei handed Cheadle a large screen device, asking her to scroll through it for all recent updates.

“The ill are isolated in a different building,” Sulei said, summarizing the current situation. “We’re short on equipment and staff, but all measures have been taken to keep the settlement running and the majority of residents healthy.”

“And the research into possible causes for the illness?”

“Ongoing.” Sulei replied, a little irritated. “But this place is bigger than it might appear, initially, and as I’m sure you’ve read in the report we sent, many of our settler members have been disappearing every now and then with no trace of them left.”

“No tracking teams?”

The biologist’s neck moved ever so slightly. “It’s members of the tracking team who tend to disappear most.” She said it without bothering to conceal her frustration. “We were hoping you’d help us with this.”

“I’m sorry, but I’m afraid it’s not my job.” Cheadle said resolutely, and only stopped because the other woman did. “Disappearing members is not an uncommon problem.”

When it seemed that her reply was not sufficient, that the biologist was hoping for something more, something softened in her face, and when she spoke she did so with more sympathy. “I’m here for the patients, and you need me here for the patients. I can look over the matter if you insist, but it’s not an issue I’d recommend wasting your limited resources over.”

“I see.” Sulei muttered, hands in the pockets of her coat, thin graying hairs falling on her furrowed forehead.

Cheadle cut the silence before it could grow heavier. “You said hazmat suits are prepared for us?”

“Yes.”

“Is the disinfection antechamber functioning well?”

“Yes.” Sulei said and finally came to a halt in front of yet another long hallway, this one garishly lit, its walls lined with white protective gear and ending in a row of plastic curtains.

The sudden absence of all sound made everyone stand just a little bit straighter. “The isolation ward is right beyond this hallway.”

Cheadle nodded and led the way inside. “The report mentioned infection selectivity,” she said, taking the suit handed to her by Sulei. “Has it changed since?”

“No,” Sulei answered, her eyes meeting Pariston’s for a fleeting second as she passed him a suit. “The infection rate has remained stable; we don’t have any new cases, but the infected have not shown any signs of recovery, and the state of some has worsened significantly since infection.”

Cheadle nodded, pouring her body limb by limb inside the white suit. It was heavy and made breathing difficult, and she hasn’t worn one in a long time. Head twice its actual weight, she felt the material of it chafe her skin, smelled in its creases the stale hallways and remnants of other people. Thinking back to the pictures she saw in the report, she took off her glasses and wore her own protective goggles, zipped the suit all the way up and fastened the breathing tube to her headgear. A little sideways, Pariston was following her steps, now completely engulfed within the suit as well. They looked at each other but they had no faces then and saw nothing.

“Any recommendations before we go in?” Cheadle asked, her voice muffled and distant.

Sulei let out what sounded like a scoff. “Just don’t look too closely in their eyes.” She sighed, giving everyone a moment to get ready. “Shall we go in?”

One by one they walked through the disinfection antechamber, which would serve them upon exit and not entrance, a thing that Pariston didn’t know about until then. He was imagining a mist shower of some sort, to have some kind of antiseptic agent sprayed in his face, like a car in a car wash. He chuckled openly at the thought, and when white, featureless faces turned to him he chose to imagine they were amused too, and then he remembered, as they finally entered the blue quarantine room, how much he hated places like this. Dark and damp and full of ill people. He hated ill people, hated to be surrounded by them, and became aware now of his own health, of his own body, that he was standing and walking and not infirm in a bed, and his skin was not that color and his eyes were not dull china. He was breathing normally, only the suit made it a little hard, but he was breathing. One breath in, one out. His own heartbeat echoed inside the suit.

He could only look in their eyes. Seven pairs of them.

Pariston didn’t know that mostly children were infected with this mysterious virus, and this discovery resulted in little more than dull discomfort. His eyes sought Cheadle but she was far ahead, the shortest in the group, standing between two beds, slightly bent over one. What was she thinking of this? Was she, like him, looking too closely in their eyes?

Was he supposed to pick a child to hunch over? He stood purposeless, lost as what to do, only his eyes trying to read everything in this room and faltering. Stone walls, thin tubes, metal beds, breathing masks, squeaking wheels of rolling tables, weak fingers clutching at the sweat-soaked sheets under them, and eyes. Eyes that found him and did not leave him.

This was not his field, and he would not have chosen to enter such a place willingly. It was small, crowded, and he was perfectly useless here. He didn’t mind a lack of function, only that there was no space to be anything else. Here, one is either ill or desperate not to be.

Rashes, yellowing eyes and skin, fever, Pariston looked. Nails and hair falling off. Skin grainy and botched, and he could see rot in a mouth or two.

Again he searched for Cheadle, an anchoring act as the room swam into a quiet kind of chaos, every scientist trying to administer as much care as they could to the slowly dying who said nothing and only stared. Only Cheadle was talking, or trying to.

She stood over a boy who appeared much less debilitated than the others, most likely infected recently and still far from suffering the worst symptoms, but he was cold to her. Even though he looked feverish and weak, there was still a sharpness to his gaze and a reserved line to his mouth which suggested he wasn’t unaware that the person attempting to converse with him is someone new, and from outside the settlement. He responded to Cheadle’s questions with short, non-committal answers, his breath shortening with every word so that she had no choice in the end but to let him rest.

Pariston, this time, was the one to seek the eyes. He looked at that child, skin already discoloring, pale and brown-haired and smarter than he let on. He stared and the boy felt the gaze and stared back. Pariston’s eyes a plastic screen, his face a white, crinkly mask.

“Come here,” Cheadle’s voice called for him. “Help me with the respirator.”

Many have said before that he was good with children, but that was an elusive statement, and as he helped Cheadle with a child who couldn’t be older than eight and watched him cough up thick strings of bloody saliva, Pariston doubted anyone here would care whether he was good or not. Just do the job. Just be the assistant. Just help this kid breathe.

Just pretend you know what you’re doing. And he did.

Cheadle knew he could pretend, he could act, and he could learn how to be good at anything, and with these thoughts in mind, with the perspiration starting to collect heavily on his forehead and fingers, with the heat of his own body forming an extra suit around him, Pariston found a working rhythm that he only exited at the end of his first shift in the isolation ward, a place he will be frequenting many more times in the future, a place he will like less and less each time.

It was difficult to tell the passing of time in this room, and Cheadle could not take a glance at her wrist watch under the suit. Not knowing the time or the period they’ve spent there made her feel trapped, and with every new piece of information received or gleaned, she was duly reminded that nobody here was really equipped to handle a situation of this sort. It was far from a large-scale catastrophe in the vein of epidemics, even ones that had happened on this continent before, in this very settlement, but an outbreak of this kind was enough to wipe out a small community of people who did not know how to mitigate or stop it.

The majority here were either agronomists or botanists, some were not scientists at all, and if her observations up until this point were anything to go by, this place has become more of a sedentary farming community than a research facility. Moreover, there were still many gaps and missing links, information either undiscovered or left unsaid, things that roused her wariness and suspicions.

Cheadle was hoping for a short stay here, as short as she could make it, had packed her stuff with a certain plan in mind, but now she was doubting just how much she could stick to it. She hated this continent, this land, but knew there was no severing the variety of entanglements with it, not in any easy or clean manner, anyway, and she had only fought so hard for it because monopolizing resources was the surest way of protecting the Association and its interests. And then there was Ging, too. What a pest.

Her mind calmed down outside the ward under a shower of disinfectant spray. Sheets of white began peeling off heaving bodies, and before she could head to the little wall ledge where she had left her glasses, a hand gave them to her. Still with goggles on she looked up at Pariston’s smiling face. He was slightly disheveled and looked—in spite of his disposition and she dared think this—a little unbalanced by the experience.

“Are you alright?” He asked her, toying with a damp lock of hair that stuck to his forehead.

“Are you?” Cheadle slid the goggles to her neck and began cleaning her glasses with the hem of her shirt.

Pariston finally managed to keep that rebellious hair strand out of his eyes. “Yeah, I am.”

The two of them walked with the others outside the antechamber and back to the maze of hallways and glassless windows. Pariston’s eyes were distant but he remained close to her, and remained silent as she conversed with Sulei and her colleagues. Their footsteps echoing through identical hallways, the group passed rooms and rooms, with doors closed and open, windows and no windows, empty and with beds, people and their absence.

Some of those people, mostly kids, stood at their doors and stared, not bothering to hide their curiosity, leaning against their door frames or hiding behind them; others closed their doors the instant a voice sounded in the hallway, and Cheadle could swear that if she slid a finger inside any keyhole she’s going to poke an eye or two.

She had not been this scrutinized since the days succeeding Pariston’s (and other Hunters) trial, as if everyone, then, was noticing her anew, as if she was completely unseen, other than physically, up until that point. Back then, in the Association’s white, polished hallways, she was surveilled by objecting peers whom she knew and understood, but who were these people, here, now? They were people outside of her records, outside of what she knew, and there were many of them, more than she’d expected and more than she’d been informed.

Settlement S-507 was originally constructed by Kakin forces for military purposes and to house the growing number of soldiers and mercenaries and hired guns who flocked to the continent within the first couple years of mass arrival. There were many of them, and some had come with their spouses and children either in search of fortunes or a new place to call home—except none of them were ever really informed just how terrible this land was, just how many lives it was going to destroy, the million different ways in which it was going to kill them.

Smuggling people to the continent had become an industry in and of itself, and coming here was not cheap. Neither was leaving. Restrictions were put in place, and those who decided to break international laws by braving the journey had only themselves to rely on. Demilitarization was underway, an arduous process led by the Association and the Kakin government, but even those who had arrived here armed to the teeth and ready to claim territory could no longer return to their countries, for their own nations no longer wanted them. Effectively stripped of citizenship and human rights, and with a criminal record built on foreign land governed under no laws, thousands of people were simply left here, prisoners in an open prison, free to live the rest of their lives as they pleased, under the mercy of merciless nature, perhaps the last arbiter of their fates.

Sulei finally came to a stop before a large door and turned to address the two of them. “This is the common room. We congregate here outside of work to talk and eat.”

“You’ve arrived at quite a decent formula for the pilti potato.” Cheadle said, derailed by entering the wide room and noticing how relatively populated it was. “Are you taking all containment measures?”

Sulei gave her a wry smile, and it was the first time her face opened up in any kind of way. “To answer your first question. We did, indeed, create a decent formula; hybrid potatoes bound to become edible after the fifth hundred try. And second, we did take measures: disinfected the whole settlement to the best of our abilities, restricted movement, ‘raised awareness’, but that doesn’t mean you can stop people from being self-annihilatingly stupid.” She pointed her chin towards a group of people who were practically leering at them from over their plates. “Some of these people, especially the soldiers and mercenaries, aren’t very friendly. You’d think they’d be more thankful for taking them in. It astounded me, the degree of their scientific illiteracy.” The blonde woman looked at her. “I’m sure you understand that feeling.”

Cheadle understood it a little too well, felt that last sentence in so much of her previous work. She knew what it was like, to be operating amidst a community of pig-heads who refused to listen because they didn’t like what they heard.

“People aren’t roaming as they please, however.” Sulei continued, helping them around a table and gesturing for someone, most likely to bring food. “But they still have to eat, and we still aren’t sure of the transmission route, anyway. It seems to be inconsistent.”

“Have you collected samples from the infected?” Cheadle asked, following Pariston’s blond head from the periphery of her vision.

“We did, extensively.”

“Have you carried settlement-wide testing?”

“We’re still trying to,”

“Trying to?”

“We’re not doctors.” Sulei declared with quiet vehemence, leaning over the table to look Cheadle deep in her eyes. “Might I remind you that none of us here are doctors, or virologists, or equipped to handle human illness of this degree. We're hardly able to convince people why they should cooperate.” Then she smiled completely without joy, a challenging glint to her eyes. “The modest efforts of a bunch of smart, criminal farmers are what kept people alive till now.”

This failed to impress Cheadle. She stared back, emotionless, only shifted her gaze nonchalantly for a moment when the food arrived, but didn’t touch anything. “Your efforts are noted, but they will be absolutely useless if no stricter measures are taken, and taken fast. It appears to be quite the slow-moving pathogen, therefore only extensive testing can reveal the true number of the infected. You are not equipped, that’s true,” Cheadle raised her hand to wave pointedly at those loitering around them in the common room. “that’s why letting people come here might’ve already lowered your chances of handling a potential outbreak.”

“So what, you want a settlement-wide quarantine?”

“Yes,” Cheadle said. “It is the best measure, until we discover the transmission route, and then begin working on treatments, and a vaccine, hopefully.”

“You think it will be easy?” Sulei chuckled. “Nothing short of rounding up these mercenaries with shotguns will make them obey an enforced quarantine.”

Cheadle finally picked the spoon placed in front of her. “You won’t need shotguns, I hope. I’ll explain the situation to them and will personally handle any issues.”

Sulei exchanged looks with her two colleagues, already feeling power unwittingly slip from her hands. Cheadle wanted to inquire about Sulei’s predecessor, a distinguished Padukian biologist by the name of Clarence Coll, who had died five years ago sampling one of his agricultural experiments. He was the only non-convict among the scientists, and had personally requested Cheadle to let him join the research team. The time wasn’t right for it, she sensed.

“You can rest now, and then I want to meet with the whole scientific team afterwards, as soon as possible.”

There were still many things left unsaid behind the thin line of Sulei’s lips, but she hunkered down and nodded, the only defiance she could muster is declining to eat with them. Then finally, after she left with her two colleagues, Cheadle had a good chance to look at the food. It looked bad.

“How does it taste?” She asked Pariston who had already taken a bite, waited for him to sample the flavor patiently in his mouth.

He swallowed. “Not bad at all. A little bland.” Dipping his spoon once again in the bowl, Pariston appeared to be testing the viscosity of the soup. He hasn’t spoken a word since they exited the isolation ward. “I think some spices and extra ingredients would make something good out of it. How do they make it?”

“From hybrid crops; plants from mainland grafted into poisonous ones here to produce something edible.” Cheadle answered. “Mainly potatoes and sweet peppers have been produced at a large scale, for now. At least that’s what I’ve been told.”

The two ate their food, aware of the numerous eyes circling them curiously. They were a happenstance, an event, and people pointed unabashedly at them. Hushed talks permeated the room, but the two didn’t acknowledge the attention by looking back.

“A little sketchy, aren’t they?” Pariston said, not bothering to even whisper.

Cheadle smirked. “You’d know.”

“We do look pretty sketchy ourselves, too.” He said, then took the last spoonful of soup. Her eyes, for some reason beyond her, watched the spoon slide out of his mouth, cleaned completely of every last bit of food, reflecting a dull, yellowish gleam, and then she watched some more as Pariston began inspecting the spoon closely before laying it neatly over the bowl.

“Why were you just staring at a spoon?”

Pariston laughed quietly, acting awkward as if she had just uncovered an embarrassing hobby of his. “I like cutlery. Copper ones are especially pretty. Look here,” he gestured for her to flip her spoon, pointing towards a small engraving at the bottom of the handle. **_B &B_ **, it read. “These ones are manufactured in Kakin. Everything here pretty much is, right?”

“More or less,” Cheadle said. “It is their resources which built all this. I simply took over it.”

He surveyed the room with an amused glance then turned back towards her. “Taking over something is not the same as making it yours,” he smiled. “Don’t you agree?”

They stared at each other, people continued to mill around them, seemed to step closer and closer to their table, forming a jagged circle.

“The question is, now,” Pariston resumed, placing the spoon back on the bowl, ready to leave this room. “Are you going to make this place yours, or are you going to let them control you?”

**III**

It seemed to Pariston that they were in a constant state of physical descent, even when they were walking up a staircase. So much of this place appeared slapped together by people who had never in their lives glanced at a proper layout; windows overlooking clay walls, windows where no light came in, windows too small or too big, doors that led to other doors, and so many hallways that effectively segregated the space here into ever shrinking mazes. Yet, for a moment, walking here reminded him of strolling in the Association’s own shiny hallways, where the windows extended from floor to ceiling, where the whole of Swaldani lay at his feet, where he knew all the darkest corners and where the sun shone most.

What became of that place, anyway? Now he imagines it empty but of Cheadle, walking alone in it, sleuthing its rooms in search of something that doesn’t exist anymore, a butterfly in a glasshouse, the last of her kind.

She walked ahead of him now, around her people who were wary of her leading her to more people. He, too, was being watched, not as closely as she was, but with more apprehension; Cheadle did not look as old as she was or as strong as she was. She did not project an intimidating aura and had a talent for maintaining peace. But he was the unexpected element here, a wild card, and perhaps a confirmation of threat.

Pariston smiled as they finally joined the conference of settlement scientists, partially to his new ‘colleagues’ and fellow criminals but also in thought. Perhaps Ging was right to bring him here, to this place, in this moment, with Cheadle and nobody else.

Many people greeted them, all sporting lab coats, perhaps more for clout and distinguishability than practical purposes. Few they’d already met, Sulei and the two men who followed at her tailcoats at all times, Markov, too, and the rest were new faces. Twen wasn’t there—a tech guy, Pariston ventured a guess.

The room was small and they were strewn about it in a circle, awaiting the initiation ceremony as he and Cheadle remained closest to the exit. Two chairs were brought to them, and everyone stared at Cheadle, regarding her with a mixture of curiosity and anticipation.

“Nice to meet all of you,” she started, offering them a friendly smile. “I’m Cheadle Yorkshire, a doctor and a virologist, and the president of the Hunter Association.” The order of titles matters. “This is my assistant, Pariston Hill.”

A few respectful nods. Pariston would bet that none of them really know what her position entails but that the title itself was grandiose enough to make them listen a little more attentively.

“I’m sure you’d all like to be spared courtesies so we can get to what really matters.” She continued. “If you wish to ask me anything, go ahead, because I myself have many questions.” It sounded less like an honest opener and more of an early incrimination. “I hope after that you’ll share all information you have with me.”

A woman raised her hand.

“Hima Siwayama,” she introduced herself. Cheadle nodded. “Is it an epidemic?”

“Not yet.”

“Should we be afraid?”

“That remains to be seen.”

“Are you going to cut our funding?”

Cheadle tilted her head. “Depends on what you have achieved, or didn’t.”

“Thank you, that’s all.”

“Anybody else?” Cheadle surveyed them one by one, her eyes finally landing on Sulei who always appeared with some unsaid protest behind her lips.

The already-existing circle of tension surrounding them shrunk a little tighter. The things that happened in the isolation ward were crawling over everybody’s skin. It seemed, too, on their faces, that whatever Cheadle was going to ask is a question they’ve already pondered a thousand times.

“Why are there so many children in this place?”

“Refugees,” Sulei opened a folder, passing it through several hands before it reached Cheadle. “They arrived in waves. One in November last year, the second between December and January, and the third most recently, in April.”

Everyone breathed with the sound of turning pages. Cheadle read slowly, leafing through the folder. “Which means they’ve been here for eight months, more or less. Why have I not been informed of the true number of people in this place?”

“Because we believed it would affect our research.” Sulei answered, solemn, serious, meeting Cheadle’s stare resolutely. “To be completely honest, we feared you would cut funding.”

“But you didn’t fear for your resources?” Cheadle asked. “How are you caring for everyone here?”

“The crops we’re cultivating.” Sulei replied with a scoff and a hand wave, as if the question was too obvious to ask. “You’ve seen the fields outside, doctor; we haven’t been sitting idle these past eight years.”

“But you have significantly slowed down the pace of research,” Cheadle retorted, closing the folder but keeping it on her lap. “and the dates suggest these waves of refugees have nothing to do with it. The last time any noteworthy progress was made was three years ago.”

Markov stuttered out something that nobody understood, then he plucked up enough courage to speak a little louder. There was a jitter in his hands and he was digging the tip of his shoe in the ground to stop his leg from doing the same. “We’ve had… a couple setbacks. A flood destroyed a great deal of our crops, we’ve lost team members to several accidents and others simply disappeared.” The man’s gray eyes flitted, couldn’t look at Cheadle for more than two seconds so his gaze kept shifting to Pariston, maybe searching for more sympathy there. He swallowed. “I’m not trying to make excuses; we’ve been careless, sometimes, we’re trying to make up for what we’ve lost.” He looked down, drawing a breath. “You can decide how to deal with this later, but these children have nothing to do with it.”

“Well then,” Cheadle adjusted her glasses. “Tell me what you know about them. Where did they come from?”

“We think they were displaced from one or two of the small settlements farther north.” Markov replied, speaking slowly, his voice quiet but clear. “The series of floods of last year destroyed their homes, and then the earthquake, we believe as much.”

“You don’t mention any adults,” Cheadle said. “Did they just come here by themselves?”

“Yes.”

“That’s strange.” She hummed, tapping her fingers soundlessly on the folder, befuddled at something she couldn’t put her finger on.

Sulei nodded. “It is. We’ve asked ourselves the same questions. Where are their parents? How did they travel all the way from their settlement to ours? If they had not left their colony by themselves, then at least they _arrived_ here by themselves, perhaps losing members on the way.”

“You think and you believe and you ask yourselves,” Cheadle said. “but have you questioned them? Have they even been tested? Do you have any concrete information?”

A hesitant moment. “We didn’t question, or test, anybody.”

“Pardon?”

“We didn’t question or test them, not the healthy ones, at least.” Markov repeated, a little louder. “You can’t just… you can’t just go and ask a bunch of traumatized children about their—most likely—dead parents, or their destroyed homes, or subject them to tests to see if they deserve shelter. Some had come here gravely injured, some couldn’t bring themselves to utter a word, and some are in fact still recovering. They were many and they were terrified.”

Cheadle stared at him, unmoved. “Were they also terrified when they started spreading disease in your community?”

“It’s not their fault.”

“Of course it’s not.” Cheadle agreed. “It’s yours.”

This seemed to anger Markov, but he wasn’t brave enough to raise his voice or do more than square his shoulders and tighten his jaw. “Do you suggest we should’ve let them stay out to fend for themselves? Do you suggest that we should’ve denied them assistance?”

“I merely suggest a little more competence from fellow scientists, but alas.” Cheadle said, pinning every single one of them with a reproachful look. “Two members of your team are in the isolation ward, maybe even more are ill and we still don’t know it; I would not be surprised if some of you started displaying symptoms soon as well.” She spoke with certainty, spoke like she had seen this same situation play out before. “I doubt any of these children have been vaccinated against the myriad of viruses crawling this land, few we know and more yet to be encountered, studied, or understood. This is one of them.” Her eyes moved from one to the other. “You have been utterly careless.”

“But what if it’s us?” A botanist called Nina spoke up again, turning all eyes in the room towards her. “Isn’t there a possibility to suggest that the disease was generated here, and not wherever they came from? After all, the first person to become sick was one of us, and it didn’t happen after the refugees’ arrival.”

“We can’t rule out this possibility,” Cheadle answered. “But the rates of infection and the apparent incubation period suggest otherwise. Regardless, we won’t know for certain until we trace it backward; the community is sheltered and the number of sick people is small, it appears to be a slow-moving pathogen that spreads selectively and does not kill instantly, this should make tracing it towards a source easy.”

A moment of silence, a space for anyone to voice objections, or ask questions, or raise concerns. Nobody uttered a word. Their faces were tense but some showed a subtle kind of relief, a feeling that Cheadle was going to help instead of set the place on fire, others still appeared unsure and wary. Pariston couldn’t decide yet whether they had really wanted her here or not. If not, then they have readjusted their preparations admirably well.

“I will study the samples and help care for the patients.” Cheadle continued. “And until we know the transmission routes of the virus, I want a quarantine enforced on the whole settlement, especially wherever these kids congregate. Announce, too, that we’re holding mandatory medical checkups for everyone. I want access to the archives, as well as the profiles of every single person residing in the settlement, including yourselves.”

“I’m afraid that we still don’t have sufficient documentation for the refugees and the fighters.” Markov said, hesitant whether to stand up as well or remain seated, still perhaps acclimating to the sudden shift in hierarchy.

“Start on it, then.” Cheadle retorted, standing up, folder in hand. Pariston followed suit. “Thank you for your time, we’ll be seeing a lot of each other in the coming days. I hope to be of help, and I hope that we’ll be able to work well together. Take care of yourselves.”

Finally out of that dingy room, Pariston took a breath, feeling the start of a migraine he knew will last for the remainder of the day begin to settle in. The hallways were dimming as the sun descended outside, and just around the corner, back towards their room, someone stopped them. One of the scientists. One of the older members. He appeared a little nervous and seemed to not notice Pariston’s presence at all.

“Doctor,” he called for Cheadle, would’ve grabbed her arm if she hadn’t kept her distance and noticed belatedly that she didn’t appreciate the proximity. He took a step back, reminding her of his name. Dotti Steis, he said with a hoarse voice, and his eye level never seemed to rise above a certain point. He looked somewhere close over people’s heads and not at them. “I’ve heard so much about you, it’s a little surreal to see you here among us. We were not expecting you to show up at all.”

She nodded. “What can I do for you?”

“Nothing, really, I mean, not here or now, although I’d love to speak with you privately, about some of my own observations, but again, you just arrived, you need to rest.” He said, finishing with a little nervous smile, the bent of his posture growing more noticeable the more his mouth moved. “But I do really want to speak with you. Shall I say the opinions in our little settlement are not, monolithic, I’ll say.” He giggled. “But anyway I’d love for us to work together. It’s really an honor.”

Once again, she nodded, closed before him. “It’s been nice to meet all of you as well.”

Like something stuck between teeth, it took some twisting to get rid of him. He insisted Cheadle visit what he called his ‘private work space’ and drew her a mental map exactly three times, stressing over a particular corner turn that could get her lost.

“What a kook.”

“How many stock phrases are you going to use before you just snap at one of them?” Pariston asked her as they climbed a dark staircase, only partially teasing with the belief that they were yet to see the full extent of everybody’s eccentricities.

A new pool of fresh human subjects to endlessly speculate over—was he the only one excited by that? He was certain she had run a full mental list of them all by now, especially those who tend to melt in the background. She notices them most because they are like her. He contemplated asking her about their crimes, but decided to read them on their faces instead.

“Is that a prediction, or a warning?” She wondered aloud, stopped for a minute because she went for the wrong door before pivoting to theirs.

“An enticement.”

The room remained as they’d left it, only now the reality of it as a temporary shelter manifested. Luggage in the center of it needed to be moved, emptied and sorted out, drawers shared (top three for him, bottom three for her), personal spaces allocated. Quietly, the two of them went to work.

Like himself, Cheadle did not bring with her many personal items. He wasn’t surprised at the mini pharmacy she’d carried along, the books, the extra pairs of glasses, boxes of hair dye, a roll of dark leather he suspected contained tools of some sort. She was silent, dipping her hands in her bags and taking out one thing at a time, deciding which drawers to use for which.

Pariston pulled out one of three wine bottles he had brought with him. He had each encased in wood and secure at the bottom of his large bag. “Want a drink?”

She scoffed over a shirt she was folding. “Save it for when the situation gets worse. I’d very much like to drink then.”

“So you believe it will get worse.”

“I believe it _can_ ,” she said. “But I also believe it doesn’t have to be. Who knows, we might end up drinking in celebration.”

“Alright, I’ll save them for then.” He said, returning them to the bag, making a point of it. “You’ll know where to find them, if by chance it got worse and I’m not around, or to celebrate.”

Cheadle rolled her eyes. “I appreciate it.”

Stuff moved slowly; both of them seemed to be prolonging this cleanup so that discussing sleeping arrangements could be avoided, so that they had something to do in a new place where they still couldn’t move freely, or know how to, and it was still too early to speak about his nen situation and too late to suggest taking a walk. He didn’t like being shut in so early in the day. The night was ripe, and when he looked outside the window there were so many stars, and out there was Ging, too, outside a clay building where Pariston could see everyone dying.

There was silence, as well. That special kind of silence found only in nature, except something nagged at him about it, something he couldn’t place, an absence of sorts, and to find an absence in silence was a strange thing. It is defined by absence.

He fought to stay awake because he despised the idea of sleeping so early. Cheadle was in the tiny bathroom changing her clothes while he changed his.

“You’ve done well today.” Her voice reached him from the bathroom.

“Oh?” Pariston put the last of his things in the drawers, watched her walk back, now in her pajamas, then sneak under the bed sheets where she placed that same folder on her lap. “Thank you. It was a new experience.”

She wasn’t going to sleep but didn’t seem interested in discussing this new experience with him either, so eventually Pariston succumbed, but only to lying down. He pulled the sleeping bag to a corner where he could observe the night sky and slipped inside, his face directly facing the window.

What was the night for? What was _this_ night for?

“Are you thinking of Ging?” He asked, the stars outside grinning with more teeth than a shark.

“Tangentially.” She said, her hands and the paper under them the same texture.

The night was for talking, and absence.

**III**


	4. Slow Dancers Are the Last Ones Out

A needle in the skin, a slanted shaft of light, not like a hospital but close. Pariston sat against the wall, draped in protective gear, and watched Cheadle collect her blood samples, her saliva swabs, throwing away one syringe after another, one pair of gloves after another. The process was meticulous, obsessive, and she did it while asking a long series of questions, slowly growing her pile of medical profiles. Pariston spent most of the last three days with a pen and paper in hand, writing down all that information.

Markov was helping, mostly with convincing the children to sit still and take the invasive tests. Right now, he sat with one of them in front of the window, and was amusing the listless boy with a primitive show of shadow theater. Markov’s hands joined together to form a decapitated bird that soared on the column of light adorning the clinic floor. The headless bird glided out of the frame and back into it, out and back, its long, heavy, split tail dragging behind it.

And then Pariston realized it. The bird cut flight and Pariston figured out finally what had distinctly estranged him since their arrival, since they set foot on shore and since the dead insect in Cheadle’s palm.

He hasn’t seen a single animal in this place. There were no animals anywhere, no wildlife, none of the innumerable critters he saw during his last time spent here; the small ones that scurried behind bushes, the big ones that could eat a man whole, the horned and venomous and clawed, not even birds, no other living creatures beside the bug Cheadle had accidently killed.

The place was devoid of any non-human inhabitants.

“Markov, do people here eat meat?” Pariston asked nonchalantly, noticing the shrinking column of light under the other man’s feet.

The question seemed to light up something in Markov’s head, like he had just remembered something he had completely forgotten. His eyes widened for a moment, his mouth slightly open, as if he was trying to recall every dish he’d ever eaten. “No, we don’t. No,” he finally said, then he chuckled. “I mean, people here barely eat anything other than potatoes.”

Without prodding, the boy walked towards the chair when Cheadle beckoned for him. He took off his clothes then sat in front of her, staring straight ahead, extending his arm when she asked him, opening his mouth, letting her check his teeth and gums, shine light into his eyes, take blood from him, mark the inside of his arm with a number, but he answered none of her questions.

“Still can’t get them to talk?” She shot the question to Markov, quietly aggravated, adding the kid’s samples to those of the others, all labeled with numbers but no names. “Still can’t even know what they’re _called_?”

Markov shook his head, helping the small kid stand up on his feet. “The majority won’t say anything. We really don’t know what happened to them; they’re very reluctant and stubborn.” He said. “But few did speak, though. They did say their names, at least.”

“Which ones?”

“A couple kids in the isolation ward.”

Cheadle threw the waste in a bag and wrapped it tightly.

“What are you thinking, doctor?”

“I’m thinking of dividing the three groups of refugees into separate categories, for comparison.” She said. “Can you help with that? Do you remember which child came in which wave?”

Markov hesitated, noting the antagonism in her question, the silent indictment. “I… I remember the _number_ of children in each wave. We can also, I think, start with the ill kids, we can ask them; despite their illness, they seem to be older and more… intelligible.”

Like the one Cheadle had spoken with, like the one who had stared back at Pariston.

“What would comparison between them help you determine, doctor?”

“Who’s normal and who isn’t.” She said, opening the door for him. “Bring me the next patient, please.”

**III**

The flash light made Nina’s big brown eyes appear like two pools of muddy water, like the little tunnels Cheadle made with her index and middle fingers in her mother’s soaked flowerbed.

“Are you feeling well today?”

“Yes, I love the summer.” Nina said, her round face swelling with a soft smile. “I used to get the flu every season, but I suppose one of the good things here is how rare it is. Influenza, I mean.” Her eyes flitted to Pariston when the flash light left them. “Have you ever heard of any flu cases here in the continent?”

Cheadle shook her head, gesturing for Nina to open her mouth. “It might very well exist in the continent, but with very little opportunity for circulation. Humans are few and far between, here. Although it’s possible that we have passed a few common mainland viruses to animals.”

“A virus strand could evolve to infect animals, too. It’s such a fascinating field.” Nina added, then chuckled softly. “Maybe I should have studied it.”

Nina’s arms were long at her sides, her whole body tinged with a peachy hue, and the fuzzy hair on her cheeks was long so that in sunlight it created a halo around her face. A deep scar blemished her back, a knife between her shoulder blades. She flinched when Cheadle inserted the needle.

“Why did you study virology, doctor?”

“Because I believed it would be challenging.”

“Not to find cures, save people?”

“Noble intentions usually come later.” She said, pulling the needle out of Nina's arm. “Why did you study agronomy?”

Nina shrugged. “In high school, I looked at onion cells under a microscope, and thought they were pretty. The way they were stacked together, like a melting beehive. The order of it.” Then she smiled. “I believe things exist because they are good, because their very existence is good. Viruses might challenge that notion to some, to those who believe that humans are the center of the universe. Anything that harms us must be bad, and therefore must be eliminated, but sometimes I envision a world where we just let things be.”

“You envision a world where you, your colleagues and others die preventable deaths, needlessly?” Cheadle asked, giving the agronomist a piece of cotton to place on the puncture point. “Where suffering takes its course?” She looked Nina in her bright, dreamy eyes, in the haze of them. “Do you believe suffering is good?”

“I believe it’s part of the lawful order of the world.” Nina said. “The world I envision is not one where we die needlessly, but one where we simply accept unfortunate deaths not as needless but normal and natural. We lose, but sometimes, without doing anything, without fighting back, things can return to us.”

Cheadle took the agronomist’s samples and placed them next to the others. “I don’t agree with you.”

“I don’t expect you to, it _is_ very morbid.” Nina laughed, and it made her look too young and too carefree. “But it’s the world we live in now, isn’t it? This land, it’s full of mass graves. So many people have come here in search of eternal life, but no ways have been spared in killing them. If eternal life, for example, is good, there would have been ways to achieve it. I have accepted that, and that we are no exception as well. Nobody is special. Suffering surrounds us, and I let it be.”

“Where were you, when all that was happening?”

“In prison.” Nina answered. “But you already know that.”

Cheadle’s eyes wandered over the other woman, over her long torso and short legs, over the valley collapsing her stomach. “Have you ever been pregnant, Nina?”

Nina nodded, her finger tilling that valley from top to bottom. “It died shortly after birth.”

“Here?”

“Yes, here.”

Cheadle nodded. “The father lives in the settlement as well, I assume.”

“He does, yes.” Nina replied, drawing her shoulders closer to herself. “We’re married. We married here. Not officially, by any means; no papers or rings to prove it, nothing. But we did.” She chuckled. Then, when nobody said anything, she added, looking up at Cheadle with worry in her eyes. “Will this affect our prison sentences?”

Cheadle smiled and shook her head. “No, it won’t.”

“What’s the scar on your back, if you don’t mind me asking?” Pariston asked, speaking for the first time since Nina entered the room. Cheadle herself had contemplated the question, but thought it inappropriate to ask. Scars like that rarely told good stories, but Pariston didn’t care about good stories. He spotted damage with hunger in his eyes, with predatory curiosity.

Nina looked up at him, not hesitant to speak but taking a moment to assess him personally. “An ex-boyfriend flew into a rage and stabbed me.”

Pariston smiled. “You stabbed him back?”

“I did.”

“Is that why you were in prison?”

“The first time, yes.” She said, her eyes unwavering. “Manslaughter.”

“Why didn’t you plead self-defense?” Cheadle asked her.

“You don’t get to plead self-defense when you stab back a few too many times and then hide the body.”

If any of them felt guilt for their ensuing amusement, none expressed it.

“What do you think of the children here, Nina?” Cheadle asked once again this question that she had ventured to every scientist and ex-fighter that came for the checkup. She had asked it so many times now that the very premise of it felt a little unreal.

Nina finally stood up, smiling thankfully to Pariston who began handing her back her clothes. “What I think of their presence here or what I think of them?”

“Any thoughts you have.”

“I think they’re experiment subjects that have either escaped or have been released.” Nina said with a resolution mixed with a kind of quiet indifference, like she had reached this conclusion and didn’t care for any further theories. Her eyes, too, weren’t searching Cheadle’s for any corroborations or validations.

Cheadle wasn’t convinced. “Maliciously?”

“Maybe, maybe not.” Nina said, zipping up her trousers. “Many experiments have been done in the continent, and maybe some are still ongoing. We’re not the only ones living here, or experimenting. It’s an unimaginably vast land, and we know that many people have come here.”

“If they are experiment subjects as you say, then what were those experiments?”

“I don’t know.”

“If you were to guess.”

“Gerontology.”

Cheadle stood and watched Nina bend down nonchalantly to tie her shoes, waiting for her to straighten up again. “Why gerontology?”

“Because it’s behind what everybody deep down came to search for here.” Nina answered. “People all over the world heard about nitro rice, they heard about the closest thing to immortality humanity had come to know. How to control aging, how to live forever. One group of ‘amateur radical gerontologists’, as they called themselves, entered the continent through our shore, had stayed with us in the settlement for a short period of time, and they claimed their purpose was to ‘farm’ nitro rice. They were very friendly.”

“You didn’t warn them of the futility of their mission?”

“We did,” Nina smiled wistfully. “But when someone has a dream in their eyes, can you really take it away?”

Cheadle was becoming impatient with the elusiveness and tone of every answer she received. There was no apparent reluctance to answer or engage, and Nina specifically was one of the more talkative residents here, but she could not help but feel the pressing air of conspicuous silence around some details. With every new checkup, with every new interviewee, this sense of deliberate obfuscation pervaded her mind. There were things Cheadle didn’t ask about because she wanted them offered voluntarily, was waiting to hear them without prompt, for someone to point them out and speak of them.

“So you think that group might be responsible?”

“Groups _like_ them.”

“But isn’t the fact that the subjects are children challenge this theory?”

“Maybe. Maybe the subjects were their parents.” Nina replied. “Is it known how regular consumption of nitro rice affects children?”

Cheadle shook her head. “No, but we do know how it affects those who had consumed it once. Experiments had been done, and some of the subjects were children between the ages of twelve and seventeen.”

“And?”

“Diarrhea. For months. Same physical reactions across different demographics.” Cheadle shared Nina’s irreverent chuckle. “But that’s the problem with ‘life-extending’ substances; only time can really prove how effective they are.”

Nina nodded. “I see.”

“During our first meeting, you suggested the refugees might not be the source of the infection, and you said it might be one of you.” Cheadle said. “Do you have any more to say about that?”

Nina, fully clothed again and solemn, ready to open the door and leave, shook her head. “You might want to speak with Gregory Buress on this. She was the first to become sick.”

**III**

“Why were you reluctant to believe her theory?”

Cheadle stopped in the middle of the stairway, and took a minute too late to turn around. The building was quiet in the afternoon, warmer, clammier, the eco-friendly materials of which its constructed malleable, almost softening with the oncoming nightly heatwave, willing to be reshaped anew. Descending or climbing, she lost her sense of orientation for a moment.

“What does a fatalist have to say about life.”

Pariston walked a step down, but it didn’t make the directions any clearer. She felt a little feverish as he stood over her, one step higher. His coloring made him blend strangely well with the surrounding brown walls and floors, with the sickly yellow of creeping sunlight.

“Are you sick, Cheadle?” His voice trickled from far away. “You look sick.”

Her ears rang. That gurgling sound again. “I’m not sick.”

Pariston took her hand and pulled her down so they could sit on the steps. She resisted, but his grip on her fingers was strong. She let him guide her down, came at face level with him, took a deep breath when his fingers slid under her bangs to check her temperature.

“We shouldn’t be sitting here, like this.” She whispered, her knees brushing his, his cold hand on her temples.

“There’s no one here.”

Her skin was hot, and her eyes were unfocused, that undecided look swimming in them. Pariston moved his hand to her neck, his other hand still holding hers. She opened her mouth for an objection but nothing came out. Her chest moved up and down, slowly, a leaf in a breeze. The shackles around his ankle burned.

“It’s like we’re the only ones in the building.”

She snorted weakly. “What a nightmare.”

“You have a fever, Cheadle.” Her skin and the walls were the same. Tender he could dent them if he squeezed hard enough. “Did you get infected?”

“No, it’s just a drop in blood pressure. I just need to rest a bit.” She said, tilting her head back, resting it against the wall. “Besides, if I got infected, the symptoms won’t appear so quickly, anyway.”

Pariston watched her eyes wander the ceilings, staring at the invisible line from the tip of her upturned nose to her dimpled chin, down to her neck, exposed to him, his hand still there so that he couldn’t tell apart her temperature from his anymore. His thumb rested over her throat, pressed over it, a little darker than the skin under it, felt her swallowing.

“Do you fear that you might get infected?”

“I’m prepared for it as a very real possibility. Doctors get infected all the time.”

“But do you fear it?”

He wanted to kiss it, the neck held in his hand. His thumb caressed it, up and down, felt it tense against his touch. It was interesting, that she was yet to snap at him, that she let his hand wander to the back of her neck, to the soft hairs, the little bones.

“She asked me if it will affect their prison sentence,” Cheadle murmured, more to the ceiling than to him, a somber smile adorning her face. “marriage.” A half-hearted laugh escaped her. A marriage here bigger and smaller than everything else.

Pariston pressed harder. “It makes you feel bad?”

“Yeah.”

“Then you should help them.”

“They don’t trust me.”

“They will,” he said. “you’re a trustworthy person.” Cheadle looked down again, seeking his eyes and not the misshapen clay protrusions of the ceiling. “They don’t have a choice.”

Her hair fell on his hand, tickling his wrist. “Do you know how to speak with children?”

Pariston smiled, finally slipping his hand away from her neck, from the slightly red fingerprint he left on it. “I can try if you want me to.”

She nodded and he helped her up, then felt her hand leave his as she continued down the stairs, down towards the isolation ward. Pariston followed her, the hallways darkening, her white button-up shirt the clearest thing ahead.

He didn’t tell her about the headaches. They were becoming more painful, more frequent and lasted longer. It seemed that his body had joyously recalled its worst affliction from the deepest recesses the moment his nen was suppressed, happier now that nothing stood in the way of pain. Back then, a controlled dose of aura to his head was enough to stop the worst migraine, but then he was no longer able to do that; no aura would flow in his body, and the “lawful order of the world” resumed unabated. Something about the place here aggravated his pain such that he felt his brain swelling inside his skull, threatening to burst out of it. It was at once better and worse at his home-prison, or so he remembered.

Is it the constant proximity to her? Is it some physiological reaction to his nen, so close to him but not his, entrapped and entangled with hers?

After the loss of his nen, the best solution to mollify the pain was an old one, a simple, primitive method from the earliest days of this scourge, brought back from childhood when he still didn’t know anything about nen. Total, complete darkness. Pariston would go to the room farthest away from any natural light, pull the drapes shut, and sit in a sheltered corner for as long as he needed to; sometimes for a couple hours, sometimes so debilitating it was he’d spend half a day nested in a closet where darkness was so encompassing it swallowed all light, all reflections, all glints and gleams, swallowed his very being.

There were no dark places here like the closet at his home, not any he discovered yet. Glassless, drapeless windows worked to always let even the slightest light in, and the neon tubes that lined some ceilings in the building were lit all night.

It was dim, in the building, but never dark. A hazy, grainy dimness that made everything seem like an old movie reel.

What would happen, Pariston wondered, if he asked Cheadle to alleviate the pain of his migraines with her own nen? She had let him touch her, but it wasn’t trust. His nen will not be given back without at least a bit of trust, the kind established here, in his work. Cheadle has to feel that he’ll stand by her if she needed him, that he’ll help with this, that he’ll learn to help, only then will his nen be brought on for negotiation. Asking for it too early would risk losing it for good.

The isolation ward hallway again. The white suits again. Something putrid hung in the air, a bowl of rotting fruit. They weren’t alone.

Sulei stood inside the ward, fully clad in her suit. “I didn’t expect to see you here today, doctor.”

“Where do you expect to see me, Sulei?” Cheadle asked dryly.

“In the little clinic you have set up for yourself, of course.”

“In which you’re yet to show up for your medical checkup.”

“Tomorrow.” Sulei said. “Thought it would be better for you to finish with the refugees and soldiers first.”

Cheadle looked up at the taller woman, her wry smile murky behind the protective screen of her headgear. “I would’ve finished much sooner if you were a little more competent at collecting data and information about the people you have allowed into a research facility, but I digress. Any new developments?”

“Slight worsening, but an hour ago, this happened,” Sulei answered, leading them towards one of the farthest beds where one of the children lay, catatonic. “He’s breathing, his heart is beating, but otherwise he’s completely unresponsive. His eyes aren’t moving.”

Two dark wells stared, unblinking, at the three figures towering over the face they had sunk into. The boy lay, frozen in a night terror, his arms wooden at his sides. If the smell outside was coming from this small body, nobody could tell. Air only left their suits but didn’t enter it.

Pariston looked away, seeking the other boy, the older one, the more interesting one, and to his delight found him looking back. He nodded, the boy acknowledged it by not looking away. The ill teen looked worse but no less aware.

Cheadle was already making to examine the unresponsive boy, and she had noticed the looks Pariston exchanged with the other one. With a silent gesture she agreed to let him go there. Sulei’s gaze followed him as he retreated away from one death bed to another. She didn’t like it, and even though he turned his back to her he could still feel her, disapproving and apprehensive.

Now that he was closer to the boy, Pariston guessed the kid was about fourteen years old. His full height was now also more apparent as he sat hunched in bed instead of lying down in it. The plate of food next to it was left untouched.

“You with that new doctor?”

“Yes, I am.” Pariston replied, pulling a chair to sit next to the bed. “My name’s—”

“Pariston. I know. I heard it.”

Dismissive, but mostly bored. His eyes indicated an unwelcoming curiosity. Pariston smiled. “And what’s yours?”

“Sam.”

“How are you feeling, Sam?”

“Like I’m dying.”

Sam chuckled and Pariston did, too. He pulled his chair closer. The kid sat a little straighter.

“Anything more specific?”

“No.”

“You’re not feeling any pain?”

“I’m not feeling anything.” Sam said with little emotion. “I can’t feel anything. I’ve lost all sensation in my body.”

Pariston tilted his head, seeing the tail end of a rash that was eating up the skin around the kid’s neck. “That’s terrible.”

“You don’t look too concerned.”

“I’m not,” Pariston admitted. “I don’t know you.”

Sam smirked and leaned closer. “I know you’re not a doctor.” He said. “I knew the moment you came in here, the first time around.”

“Then you must know that none here before us are doctors, either.”

“Only she,” Sam jabbed his chin towards Cheadle. “I know because of how she spoke to me.”

Pariston nodded. “She wasn’t very satisfied with your answers.”

“I wasn’t very satisfied with her questions.”

“Cheeky,” Pariston smiled. “I like you.”

“How old are you?” Sam asked in a demanding tone that was shy of sincerity.

“Twenty-five.”

“You look fifty.”

“Cheeky _and_ rude,” Pariston frowned in mock disappointment. “you ought to be nicer.”

Sam rolled his eyes. “I’m a dying child. I get to be mean.”

“How do you know you are dying?”

That seemed to give the kid a pause. His smug little expression melted away quietly, and he shrugged and lapsed into a silent moment of contemplation. Pariston glanced at Sulei and back to Sam.

“Did they tell you you’re dying?”

“No, but I’ve seen others die here.”

“How far is the damage of your body?”

“I don’t know, I don’t look.”

The head bowed down, a small patch of lost hair above the nape, nailbeds a yellowing green, the skin over the knuckles and between fingers discolored, more calloused than elsewhere, the pebbly rash sneaking treacherously outside the short sleeves.

“When did you arrive here, Sam?”

The boy shrugged. “Months ago. I don’t even remember anymore.”

“Were you sick when you arrived?” Pariston asked. “Were you able to feel pain then?”

Sam raised his head again to look at Pariston, appearing puzzled by something he was seeing inside his head. “I was sick, yeah.”

“Did you already have the rash then?”

“I saw it when I was here, and then I didn’t want to look anymore.”

“Does it scare you?”

Sam finally focused on him, trying to make out his features behind the screen separating them. He didn’t succeed, and looked away again. “It does, a little, I guess. It's gross.”

“Do you feel safe in the settlement?”

The boy smirked, retaining some of that mischievous glint to his eyes. “Do _you_?”

“Safer than if I were outside it, for sure.”

“Why are you here, anyway?” Sam asked.

“To help you. Why are you here?”

“I was _born_ here,” Sam’s smirk grew bigger and more devious. “My mother is the jungle, my father the mountains. I’m a demigod, if you think about it.”

Pariston chuckled. “Well then, I must thank you for entertaining a mortal such as myself.”

“My pleasure, Pariston.”

“You should eat your food.” And with that he stood up, exchanging a courteous nod with the kid, and turned around to rejoin Cheadle and Sulei, could see the tension between them in the way they stood, in the reluctance in which they interacted with each other. Cheadle didn’t like the animosity and obfuscation, Sulei didn’t like the sudden transfer of power, and apparently, she neither liked their attempts at striking conversation with the patients.

“Gregory is a strange case,” Sulei said when Cheadle mentioned the ill scientist. “the first to become sick, but she’s still alive even though those who fell ill after her had died.”

“What are you trying to get at?” Cheadle asked.

Sulei stepped closer, huddling the three of them in a tight circle. “She’s a liar. She’s always been.” The biologist’s eyes moved pointedly from Cheadle to Pariston. “Never was a team player, has spent months here but still refuses to speak.”

“Maybe she’ll respond to us.”

“What makes you think that, doctor?”

“You call her a liar, you say she’s not a team player, which suggests tensions with you,” Cheadle said. “If someone not from within the team approaches her, she might cooperate.”

Sulei’s suit crinkled with the shifting of her weight. “She’s dying.”

“She’s the person who can help the most, right now.” Cheadle insisted. “Through her, we might be able to learn what kind of contact happened, originally. She’s the index patient, and therefore possesses valuable information.”

The biologist said nothing, arms folded, overviewing something in her head.

“Is there a reason you don’t want us to speak with her?”

“I didn’t say that,” Sulei’s voice rose a notch. “I implied that I don’t trust her to speak any truths about whatever happened. I don’t think she might even be _able_ to speak.”

Cheadle nodded. “I appreciate your concern, but I’d like to determine the validity of whatever she says myself.”

“Alright, she’s there,” Sulei said, taking a step back and pointing towards a bed surrounded by long drapes separating it from others. “You’ve already seen her, but I bet she’s nothing like the photos on the profile from which you had picked her for this team.” She sounded dry but not entirely unsympathetic. “Whatever she brought in with her has been eating her face.”

“Noted,” Cheadle said. “I’d like you to leave us alone with her, please.”

They watched Sulei leave, shooting Sam a quick glance and continuing towards other patients. She agreed to leave them alone with Gregory but she wasn’t going to leave the ward, opting to circle the place like a hungry cat.

“I may have overestimated your ability to maintain peace.” Pariston said, walking beside Cheadle towards the isolated bed.

Cheadle scoffed. “I _am_ maintaining peace, unless by peace you mean personally appeasing the ego of a power hungry criminal.”

“But what if maintaining this peace involves appeasing egos?”

“I’d rather have my face eaten then.”

Pariston hummed. “But you do appease others. Maybe the nature of lawlessness here makes you act differently?”

“I’m sure you’ll have plenty of time at night to think over that smarmy question.” She retorted, stopping just short of pulling the drapes to enter this isolated quarter. She stood still, hesitant, processing something, then without further stalling she lifted the drape and entered.

Pariston took a breath and buried it in his chest. Even inside the suit, he felt invaded, felt that the very air within his protection gear was contaminated. The little square was busy with two bodies hampered by heavy, large suits and a bed in its midst, the body lying on it literally disintegrating.

“Gregory?” Cheadle asked gently, taking careful steps closer to the bed.

It was easy to imagine that every corpse lining this continent had had a name once, but Pariston couldn’t imagine that any name applied to this ruin of a human, that it was still sentient enough to respond to one. It was closer to a rotting tree bark than flesh.

A dark, open wound for a mouth moved, and then closed again because the sounds didn’t come out right, didn’t come out as words. Cheadle didn’t interrupt the second attempt, or the third. She didn’t interrupt because Gregory was intent on speaking intelligibly.

Two eyeballs rolled from one of them to the other. Something was growing in the whites of the scientist’s eyes, brown protruding needle points. If he looked any closer, he might see the little dots moving. Yet, the irises were lucid, saw them and took them and regarded them knowingly.

“Hello…” the mouth moved, and a rustic, broken voice came out of it. “…new faces.”

Cheadle smiled and leaned closer, lost for a moment because the limp hand she wanted to take in consolation threatened to fall apart at the slightest touch. Gregory’s eyes rolled down, unhinged, and appeared, despite the decaying skin around them, to be apologetic, like it was too sad that Cheadle couldn’t hold her hand, like she was the one consoling the doctor.

“I’m sorry,” Cheadle whispered, finding little comfort in touching the loose, falling strands of hair strewn on the pillow.

Gregory stared, unable to emote anything comprehensible, unable to move anything but eyes that belonged to everything but the peeling, devoured face they were clinging to. Pariston didn’t know what to do. Cheadle was hunched over, silent, her expression obscured.

“Can you talk to us?” She asked, implored, almost. “What happened, first?”

Gregory managed a weak shake of the head. “Don’t matter…” the two of them stared at her as she continued to sway her frail, misshapen head. “This place, it’s bad.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s all over…” Gregory murmured, her words wheezing breaths. “It’s everywhere.”

“The illness?”

Gregory nodded.

“Tell me what you know, _please_ ,” Cheadle said, a quiet, desperate frustration in her voice. “What kind of contact happened, with another person, animal, plant, anything. Did you breathe in something, eat or drink something?”

“Water,” the scientist said. “I drank water, from the well.”

Cheadle’s eyes widened. “The industrial well outside?”

“The well, in my room.”

Cheadle took a long breath, her white suit crinkling, the color of it too bright beside the decomposing, sickly green skin next to it. She was growing impatient. “A water well, in your room?”

“He said…” Gregory began, ignoring the incredulous question, struggling to manage the words out. “… you’ll come.”

Cheadle leaned even closer, hunched over the other’s face. There was no proof, nothing, but Pariston knew both of them were thinking it, only Cheadle didn’t venture the name out, prudence or skepticism stopping her, so he did.

“Ging?”

The eyes rolled up to him, a weak nod. Pariston met Cheadle’s fervent gaze, and she looked at him as if he had any answers to offer or explanations, as if he could speak on behalf of the human wreck on the bed. He had nothing.

“You know who we are?” He asked again.

Another nod, and something, he imagined, close to a smile. “I’m sorry…” her eyes turned to Cheadle. “I ask a favor.”

“What is it?” Cheadle asked, somehow her voice weaker than that of the bedridden scientist.

“Kill me.”

“No,” Cheadle said, sounding confident, perhaps already knowing that this would be the favor. “You still have to tell us what you know.”

“You agree, with me.”

Cheadle frowned. “About what?”

“Better, if I die.”

The doctor and the scientist stared long at each other, saying nothing. Gregory let Cheadle be silent, let her consider the favor, the infection peeling her to nothing, to rotting flesh, to pain. The little sealed quarter grew smaller with every breath taken, and Pariston was curious, because he didn’t know what Cheadle was going to do.

How many people have she pulled off life-support? Was she thinking of this as a similar situation? Did she believe in mercy killing? In putting an injured animal down?

He looked at Gregory, at the remains of her hair, at the shriveling nails, at the sinkholes in her arms and legs. Only her eyes spoke of personhood. There was still a will in her, something old and luminous and intelligent and terrified, a sliver of everything she still held onto and of which she was willing to let go, and in his head, there was a song that started with a beat like a ticking clock.

“Can you give us a moment, Pariston?” Cheadle finally spoke, her voice resolute and even.

“Of course,” he said. “I’ll be outside.”

“Thank you.”

He left them, parting the drapes, stepping out of that coffin, any sense of fresh air he pulled into his lungs a simulacrum of the real thing. The headache announced itself again, and he had a desire to just sink under a blanket until the pain of it went away. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw decaying skin and muscle. He stood still and wandered the ward with his gaze, to the corner where Sulei still loitered, to the bed where Sam had fallen asleep, to the windows up high that made him feel like he was standing in a crumbling church.

In the silence, he could hear the rustling of leaves outside; but that, too, was only in his head.

And then Cheadle called for him and asked that he bring Sulei in, to let her join them in the closed off space that separated Gregory from the rest of the world. And then a long, patient discussion happened between the three women with surprising amiability as everybody sat around the bed, a jury in a lawless court.

The dying biologist had to hear everything, from how her life would end to how her body will be treated afterwards, chiming in with a few nods and fewer words, even a couple jokes at her own expense. Sulei, too, listened, and seemed to have spent a long time without looking directly, or perhaps at all, at the face of her colleague.

The sight of Gregory on the bed moved something in her, made her quieter, more willing to bend, but there was no reading the thin line of her lips or the creases on her forehead, and she exchanged very little with Gregory, purposefully, he thought, yet she talked with Cheadle at length about everything there was to talk about regarding the situation, and the two appeared to finally share a common space where personal grievances didn’t matter as much. A decision was finally made, and after a moment Pariston was left alone with the patient while the other two left to make preparations.

He smiled, and imagined her smiling back.

“Is Ging here, by any chance?” He asked, looking at the pulsing black stains in her eyes.

She nodded.

“He visited you today, to say goodbye?”

Another nod, and then nothing was said as the two of them waited. Time was nothing here, and if Pariston looked up like she did he could see the long white drapes extending all the way to the ceiling, where they grew solid like walls, walls that shot up beyond the ward and beyond the settlement and all the way to the outside world. Everywhere he looked here he saw prisoners.

Then they were back, with more people in tow waiting outside, most likely to cart the corpse away to one of the labs. Cheadle and Sulei re-entered the room.

“Are you ready, Gregory?” Cheadle asked, a needle in one hand, the other still fumbling with how to console.

“I’m ready.” Gregory said, taking her eyes off the ceiling to look at the person who was going to euthanize her. “Thank you, Cheadle.”

Pariston sat and watched the whole thing quietly, disappearing into the room, listening to things he knew and things he didn’t, and as Cheadle inserted the needle, it appeared that Gregory chose to die staring at him, that glassy sheen in her eyes steadier but filled with what no longer belonged to her.

How did she see him? What did she know about him? What has been spilled to her, what has she seen? He was part of her world before she was a part of his, that’s what usually happens when you know of others even when you don’t ever see them. Pariston’s world was populated by enemies and pawns and tools and entertainment, but she was none of that, _couldn’t_ be any of that, and there was no chance of making her one, or seeing her become one. She was a passing figure, in so many ways and like so many others, but he was already feeling her lodging inside him, carving a place under his skin, long tunnels and ridges, festering. Then he thought— _not her_ , but the idea of her.

To die here was to die like this.

He straightened up with everyone else, helped clothe what’s left of this corpse inside a protective suit, stood to the side when it was hauled to another bed to be pushed outside the ward, and was the last one at the enclosed space, now empty but of its walls, and a bed.

Pariston glanced back at the stained mattress, and found a peculiar, shiny leaf. He took it.

In the disinfection antechamber, everyone was silent, and then he finally got to step outside and take off the suit, yet still felt as if his body was nestled inside a second layer of skin, unable to step outside of it.

Cheadle was in her own corner too, in her own thoughts, taking a little too long in cleaning her goggles, then her glasses, and Sulei had stepped away as well, and was leaning with her shoulder against the wall, her back to them. She was crying.

The quiet, unexpected weeping was perhaps the reason it took Cheadle a moment to just turn around and address the world around her. Perhaps grief wasn’t part of whatever little strategy she concocted in Gregory’s cell. It wasn’t just him who didn’t want to be confronted with this, and yet she left the side of the wall and walked towards the other woman, placing that same hesitant hand on her shoulder. It made Sulei sob harder, but Cheadle didn’t retreat on the small comforting gesture.

He was a pair of legs and a headache as he walked towards them, and without glancing at Sulei he tapped Cheadle’s shoulder. She looked up at him.

“Do you need me here? I want to rest a bit, if possible.”

She nodded. “You can go. I’ll work in the lab for tonight.”

Pariston gave her a little wave and left, his body disappearing in the shadows before he turned a corner. Her attention turned back to Sulei, long, thin fingers pressing on eyes, to hide the tears, to stop them, the sound of her sniffing herself back to composure the only certainty in this little moment they shared.

“Your presence there was important.” Cheadle told her, withdrawing her hand when Sulei finally lifted her head and loosened her shoulders.

Sulei scoffed, looking at her with a face encrusted in tears. “Once again, you do something I couldn’t do.” She said, passing her hand roughly over her face. “Gregory was my friend. We had our disagreements, but she was, and I failed her.”

“Why do you think that?” Cheadle asked.

“Didn’t you see her?” Sulei hissed and then shook her head, refusing to allow herself any more crying. “I couldn’t look at that.”

“But you did look, at the end, and it’s not going to be for nothing.” Cheadle said. “We’ll work together so that nobody here suffers like that. I will do my best to find a cure, I promise. But you have to help me, Sulei.”

The biologist nodded frantically, mindlessly, numb and distraught. “I feel severed.”

And severed she walked with Cheadle to the lab where Gregory’s body was waiting, bagged and contained and concealed. There were two other scientists there, Hima one of them. As she prepared an examination table, the other approached at their sight to hand Cheadle the deceased’s medical profile.

They hadn’t kept up with her. The updates stopped at a certain point, and what happened after ‘severe deterioration of skin’ and ‘spine deformation’ was left for Cheadle to imagine. Curiously, no pictures were taken, unlike with the children.

The truth of the matter was that Gregory Buress was left to rot alone for months, with seemingly no intervention of any kind. Sulei had an excuse, one Cheadle could understand and sympathize with, but what of the others? Were they not able to look at their ill colleague, too? There were things that she still needed to know, the relationships that had formed between these people over the past eight years, the dynamics that had brought them together or pushed them apart. She noticed that almost all of them spoke a great deal about themselves but rarely about the others.

“What was she like, Sulei?” She asked as they moved Gregory to the examination table and slowly unzipped the bag in which she was encased.

“Brilliant, erratic,” Sulei gently took the decayed arm out of the bag. “a jokester but emotionally reserved.” She continued, pulling out the frail, deboned leg. “She was eager to go on any and all tracking missions. I think that’s why she was at such a high risk of contracting something, sooner or later.”

The two stood over the decomposing human pile between them, eyes unclosed because there was no skin to slide over them. The dark impurities dotting the whites of them larger than a mere hour ago. This close and with only a face mask, without the dusty hindrance of the suit’s screen, she could see what appeared like long, green veins coursing through the remnants of Gregory’s skin.

“So you think this infection came from outside the settlement?” Cheadle asked, reaching for a pair of scissors to cut open the gown still covering Gregory’s body. “It seemed only Nina Funlime subscribed to that theory, when we spoke.”

“It’s not only Nina, we’re all split on the matter.” Sulei answered, glancing away immediately when the gown split open, revealing a sunken, dark ravine for a chest and a bloated, moldy stomach.

Cheadle gave her a moment, taking the time to inspect this strange body before her and the strange series of traumas that had befell it. She had seen similar cases, scrunched up, dried, scaly skins; atrophied, shrinking muscles; osteoporosis where the bones were rendered to hollow twigs, but nothing of this sort, and nothing with this combination of apparent symptoms.

On closer inspection, Cheadle could trace small but numerous skin erosions and gyrated depressions that littered the small patches of discolored skin, the marks of what she guessed were severe nodules and ulcers. They had no specific localization, found almost everywhere she looked, but mostly on the arms, legs and neck.

“It’s not just Nina,” Sulei repeated with a strained voice, gathering up her courage to look steadily at the body laid out before them. “When the children arrived, Gregory was the first to suggest taking them in; I dare say she was downright enthusiastic about it, and they took a liking to her afterwards. She was in their company for long stretches of time, but she was sick before that.”

“Sick how?”

“There was a rash on her body. We never knew because she hid it so well.” The biologist said. “It’s only after she fell completely ill that she told me.”

Cheadle sought a circular blade from the tray beside them. “You were the only one she told?”

“As far as I know, yes.”

“Did you see the rash?”

She placed the blade over a patch of skin with the least amount of damage, and started rotating it down, waiting for Sulei to answer.

“I didn’t,” Sulei said. “I didn’t because she wouldn’t allow me to see it until it was too hard to tell it apart from all other disfigurements.”

“Rashes are symptoms, not diseases,” Cheadle said. “You didn’t notice any other symptoms?”

“What every person in the isolation ward is displaying: fatigue, nausea, loss of appetite, reduced immunity.”

Cheadle nodded, feeling that the circular blade was reaching an oddly hollow layer where the hypodermis should be, like she was twirling a straw in an empty glass. Slowly she pulled the blade out with the incomplete cylinder of tissue within it.

Frail tendrils of what appeared to be connective tissue hung loose from the bottom of the extracted skin. She handed it to one of the assisting scientists in the lab with them. “Keep it preserved, please.” Then she turned to Sulei, clearing her throat. “I’m going to dissect her.”

It took Sulei a moment to nod. “I understand.”

But then something moved.

Four pairs of eyes turned towards one another, and then instantly towards the corpse, towards the hardened, rotten stomach.

“What was that?” Hima asked, sample still in hand, fridge open beside her head.

The stomach moved again.

“I’m going to open it.” Cheadle declared, reaching for a large incision knife.

But her blade was met with resistance. Tough and leathery, the arch of skin trembled and moiled under her hand. She persisted, finally puncturing the skin and driving the knife down, then cutting downward to open the stomach. “Get me a couple more trays.”

The ringing sound of clinking metal filled the lab as she and Sulei stared down the dark insides of this pouch. Whatever was inside had ceased movement upon meeting light, apprehensive at having its burrow dug out, and was breathing.

Cheadle heard Hima murmur a curse, heard the smallest sound in the room, the tense way Sulei breathed and the nervous shutting of the fridge door and the careful, uneasy placement of a new tray beside her. She could make out a pair of unformed eyes, a lipless mouth, fingers that weren’t growing out of a hand or a hand growing out of an arm, only little tendrils of flesh growing out of a shapeless body, latching onto the viscera around it.

She poked it with a swab stick. It twitched.

“What is this?” The other two scientists had joined them around the examination table, pale and wide eyed, the overhead lights casting shadows over their faces.

“Is this a fetus? Was she pregnant?”

“No,” Cheadle answered. “It’s been growing in the stomach cavity.”

“What do we do?” Hima asked again, chuckling nervously, out of fear or morbid bemusement. “Do we just, ‘scoop’ it out?”

Cheadle looked at her. “Actually, yes. We’ll separate it and pull it out. Get me another knife, please.”

Blade in hand, Cheadle started slicing up the sturdy tentacles that clutched for dear life around everything that surrounded them, even the blade itself. They grabbed at it and coiled around it firmly, their desperate gripping and grasping relentless and bizarrely strong. Sulei assisted, completely silent, helping her severe this parasitic creature out of its host.

“Have you seen something similar to this before, Sulei?” Cheadle asked, snatching up her hand out of Gregory’s stomach when one of the tendrils tried to seize her fingers.

“No, I haven’t.” Sulei answered. “This, whatever it is, wasn’t there, at the beginning. This is recent.”

“How would you know it’s a recent development if you didn’t visit her?”

Sulei stabbed the creature violently with her knife. It sunk, coiling on itself.

“Why do you treat us with contempt and suspicion?” She asked, glaring at Cheadle. “You think just because I didn’t see to her personally then nobody did? You believe that we had left her to die, but she was continuously being cared for. Others tried to feed her but she wouldn’t eat, treat her wounds but she wouldn’t cooperate, wash her but she chose to lie in her filth. She refused help. Actively and sometimes violently.”

Cheadle’s eyes shifted from Sulei’s indignant stare to the stabbed creature. “Remove your knife out of it, please.” She said. “It’s valuable.”

The biologist complied, pulling the blade out with a tight grip, then lowering it down beside her. Cheadle thought that Sulei could stab her now, if she was brave enough, or angry enough, but the woman was neither. After a moment she loosened her grip on the blade when she noticed the other two scientists observing their interaction closely.

“You have to forgive any mistrust on my part; you weren’t particularly honest with me in the past.” Cheadle said, turning back to their original work. “Since I was not informed of the refugees’ presence nor were any other of your team’s donors, I think it’s absolutely within my right to suspect that you might be hiding some facts from me.”

Sulei snickered, returning her knife to the flailing flesh tendrils. “Then you have to forgive _our_ mistrust and suspicion, seeing as you are the primary authority responsible for all this.” She said, managing with a single, deft roll of the knife to separate the entire creature from the pouch. She picked it up with one hand, surprisingly small now in the open, and slabbed it down on the tray. “Our research here is your side pet project. We don’t really matter. We can cultivate pink potatoes here for the rest of our lives for all you care. It’s the _money_ you want. Money off of us to keep running your organization of monsters.”

“My ‘organization of monsters’ bailed you out of prison,” Cheadle said, offering the other a mean smile. “it gave you back your life when you were on death row, months away from a hanging.”

“So I can die here, only slower.”

“Yet here you are, alive and well, unsurprisingly good with a knife.” She said, sidestepping Sulei to take a closer look at the creature, glad to find it entirely unaffected. “You signed a contract. You came here, voluntarily. Don’t forget that.” She picked up the tray and looked back at the biologist. “I will take this to the other lab for further study. Thank you for your help, everyone. You can go to bed if you want, it’s your call. I will handle the rest of the autopsy.”

Sulei watched her as she turned her back, and in spite of not being able to see her, Cheadle knew there were many more things she wanted to say, and she did say one of them.

“I’m trying to see the good in you,” Sulei said. “I’m _trying_ to like you.”

“You don’t have to like me,” Cheadle said. “you only have to trust me.”

**III**

The settlement draped in long, desolate shadows, all the hallways stretched endlessly before Cheadle. She walked alone, gazing out of passing windows at thick dark clouds, like chimney smoke that had interspersed in the air and stuck stubbornly to the sky. It was a moonless night, and her little gnarly parasite was secure in a container all its own, so was its host.

Her room was so far away, felt even farther the closer she walked towards it. Slogging through the hallways, she thought of Gregory, of what she said, and pondered making a small visit to the dead scientist's quarters, to ‘ _the well in my room’_. Did she say that because she feared somebody could be overhearing them? Did Gregory trust her colleagues? Cheadle sensed that sentence was a wordplay, a puzzle more than a description of something real, yet she resolved to look into the water settlement resources anyway.

Then again there was Ging, who apparently knew Gregory well enough to assure her of their visit. Was he really that certain that they would respond and come? Was Gregory his eyes here? It’s impossible for her to have helped him physically send the message to mainland, and if he visited her recently then he visited her in the ward and nowhere else. Markov mentioned that Ging had not appeared in the settlement for a while, which meant he most likely sneaked in without anybody’s knowledge. Ging didn’t need help breaking and entering, and she knew he could go unnoticed for as long as he wanted.

If Gregory was a friend then it was possible they’d met outside the settlement, on one of her tracking missions, along with others.

Ging could help in this. He might know what had happened at the very beginning. He might be sick, too.

The room was close. Was Pariston still awake? What did he do after leaving the isolation ward? He seemed so small to her now, amid everything else. She has been keeping a close eye on him, but they were no longer on a seaplane alone and he was hardly her only company anymore. She wasn’t his, either, and like a rat that gnaws at everything in its path, he would be exceptionally good at wheedling his way into all sorts of subgroups here. He had a talent for it, and she could benefit from that, if not use it entirely to her advantage. He could supplement what she lacked: effortless charisma, a way with people. Being attached to her would make his job difficult, since he was simply guilty by association. It didn’t matter if the two of them were true allies, people here nonetheless viewed him as an extension of her, and he was no doubt aware of that.

Whenever he left her side, he didn’t stray far. And he was in the room when she opened the door—the actual door; she always turned to the wrong one first—only he wasn’t asleep, or alone.

Cheadle stood in the doorframe, struck, watching Pariston’s tongue slow down over the cock he was sucking to gaze at her slyly from the corner of his eye. He didn’t stop, seemed to revel in observing her watching them silently, her eyes wandering over his unbuttoned shirt, his reddened lips; on Ging, lying on her bed, tank top halfway up his chest, his breath dragging with an arm over his eyes.

And then as if he had to acknowledge her presence somehow, Ging straightened up, and both were now staring at her. None uttered a word for what felt like an eternity.

Pariston turned his full face to her, at complete leisure, and seemed to challenge her to enter the room. She didn’t move. Instead, she burst out laughing, uncontrollably, glimpsing their expressions change into confusion.

“I’m really sorry to interrupt this health hazard,” she said, taking a step back, laughing some more. “Continue, please.”

Then she slammed the door shut behind her and ran back down the stairs, skipped three steps and slammed her feet on the ground and took a different hallway from the one she passed to here, the remnants of laughter dying in her throat the farther away from the room she ran, gripped instead by an abhorrent sadness and an incessant, hot pulsing that coursed through her entire body. She ran to kill it.

Cheadle sprinted without destination, could no longer hear her feet pounding on the floor, and only slowed down once she reached a floor she’s never been on, a labyrinthine stretch of stone lined with windows. She imagined passing a blue, rustic metal door that was closed, but she couldn’t see it anymore.

Heart drumming in her ears, she finally came to a stop beside a window, finally let the one following her catch up.

“You’re fast.” Ging’s voice reached her before the man himself did, still stepping through the shadows on her trail.

“And you’re an asshole.” She retorted, still catching her breath.

“You could’ve just come into the room, you know.”

She scoffed and glared at him. “To suck your dick? Fuck you.”

Ging arrived to her side, standing before her where the dim light finally reached his face. He stood there in front of her saying nothing, studying her face and body like she studied his, the way she searched for changes in his features, in his posture, searched for time.

He was himself, unmistakably, but the longer she looked the more she saw him; new scars on his face and hands, stood differently with a different glint to his eyes, a gladness in there that she hated to see. He was 34 years old when she last saw him and now he was ten years older and looked it, if only in the way he stood there, content to just take her in without awkwardness or discomfort. They were so close. She wanted to throw him out of the window.

He smiled, but she hated it.

“You look nice.” He said, but she ignored it.

“Is that why you told me to bring Pariston along?” She asked. “For free blowjobs?”

Ging leaned with his shoulder against the wall. “You know nothing’s for free in Pariston’s world.”

“Then what the hell were you doing?”

He shrugged. “It just happened.”

“I don’t trust him.”

“Then why did you go through the trouble of bringing him with you?”

Cheadle’s eyes widened. “ _Because you asked me_.”

“Since when do you do anything I ask you to do?” He asked, bemused.

Cheadle leaned her head back, taking in a long breath. “People are dying a couple floors away from us, and I think you know that.” She said. “I didn’t have to come here personally, and I sure as hell didn’t have to bring Pariston with me, so how about you own up to the fact that _you_ want us here? And maybe it _is_ for the best that I’m here, because whatever we’re facing in this place should have fallen into S-rank mission category, but I’m surrounded by shit weasels who lie and tell half-truths, so don’t you dare be one of them. Not you.”

She stared at him, hearing her heartbeat in her ears, feeling it in the tips of her fingers. He was listening but looking elsewhere.

“Pariston won't be satisfied playing nurse for long, and I’m preparing for when his mask of cordiality falls for good.” She continued, calmer, slower. “As always, he wants to make me feel left out and unimportant, wants to make me angry and put me on edge, but I didn’t come here to participate in his nonsensical mind games. I don’t really like it here, but I did come to help. I have a responsibility in this place, so I don’t care if you have to run into the mountains with an erection, if you want your dick sucked do it in your own goddamn home.”

He had that old sulky pout of acceptance on his face. “Fair.”

“And what a touching reunion, really.” Cheadle went on, drawling sarcastically, crossing her arms to look outside the window, hiding this measure of hurt with childish dejection. “I don’t see you in almost a decade only to find you enjoying a hearty blowjob. I’m moved. Deeply.”

Ging frowned, annoyed. “Let it go, will you.”

“No, I won’t let it go.” She hissed at him. “I won’t let it go because while _you_ were enjoying your blowjob, I was dissecting a scientist who before dying cared enough to mention you.”

His face underwent a subtle change, that little perpetual frown of irritation giving way to something somber, and Cheadle knew he was aware of whom she was talking about. When he spoke, his voice was serious. “Were you with her when she died?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

“Good?” Cheadle spat out. “Someone you know died a horrible, slow, agonizing death. For months. And you were there to witness it, I believe.”

“I know,” he said, pushing himself off the wall, seemed ready to book it out of there. “We’ll talk about her later.”

Cheadle stood unmoving, watching him give the floor a quick survey.

“Are you sick, too?” She asked, surveying him too as if she’ll find some ailment clear on his body, in his stance, in the way his feet shuffled under him.

“You don’t have to worry about me,” he said, smiling at her. “it’s good to see you again.”

She turned around, leaving him before he left her. “Whatever.”

**III**


	5. The Sun Shines Underneath Wily Bells

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: an instance of transphobia

Unwelcome light beamed into Cheadle’s eyes, even when she stood far away from it. Sunlight swept a path through the hallway, rolling over every shaded corner. How faded this place appeared, like she could grind the very walls to powder by passing her hand over them repeatedly, the aggressive song playing in her earbuds through her MP3 player spurring her further on to imagine this slow collapse.

She hadn’t slept well at all last night, forgoing their room and returning down to the lab to continue working, eventually falling asleep with her head on a desk. Right now she was waiting for Pariston to show up, her mind replaying scenes of Sulei stabbing the parasitic creature with her knife, over and over again, intermingled with what she witnessed last night in their room, and so it was that everybody in that room was being stabbed, including herself.

The little lab incident of yesterday had pissed Cheadle more as the night progressed, and as she remained close to said creature in its little container, seemingly unaffected, still unharmed in its shapelessness. There was a calculated carelessness about it, and it was, as Cheadle thought, a performance. A mindful scientist—and Sulei was one, because Cheadle knew the woman’s history—would never purposely damage a valuable specimen like that.

From the left end of the hallway Pariston appeared, and she could hear his sunny ‘good morning’ before he even said it. She turned off the music and stuffed the earphones in her pocket.

“Good morning!”

Yeah. “Pariston,”

Apparently he had the time to comb his hair and dress well. Vested, his button-up shirt cuffed elegantly, his leather shoes gleaming.

“Had a good night, I presume.”

He smiled. “I did, which reminds me that you didn’t spend the night in our room.”

“I was working in the lab.”

“Oh, well, I hope you don’t mind, but I slept on your bed.”

“I don’t mind at all.” Cheadle said, stepping away from the wall to start walking. “In fact, I think you should sleep on it from now on, Pariston.”

His smile grew bigger. “That’s really kind of you, but I’m not going to take it. We agreed it’s yours, after all.”

“Did we?” She murmured, but he didn’t seem to hear her. Instead, he asked what she was listening to. “Nothing. Did you get anywhere with that kid yesterday?”

“Oh, Sam. Yeah, he told me his name.” Pariston added when she looked at him, strolling beside her with his hands clasped behind his back. “I wouldn’t say I gathered any useful information about him, but he was quite forthcoming and willing to converse with me. I think I should establish some trust before diving further.”

Cheadle nodded. “Did he say if he knew any of the other kids?”

“No, but I could ask him.” Pariston said. “He seemed quite independent of them. Absolutely grew up in mainland. Although I couldn’t place his accent; he wasn’t speaking very naturally.”

That interested her. “What makes you think that he grew up on mainland?”

Pariston shrugged. “I don’t know, something about his attitude. How do I put it? He just seemed to me like a kid who’s held a smartphone in his life.”

“Touched by modernity, you mean?”

“Exactly. You shouldn’t underestimate that.” He said jovially. “I found him personable and smart in a contemporary kind of way. His age suggests he was born in mainland, anyway, unless he was somehow born in the Dark Continent before the expedition, which is very unlikely. As to the period of time he’s spent here, I don’t think he himself is even sure.”

Cheadle hummed. “So, a couple years?”

“That’s what I’m thinking.”

“Maybe he’s arrived with an independent group. Did he mention any parents?”

“No, he didn’t.” Pariston said. “Let’s say he was esoteric on the subject.”

“Esoteric?”

“Yeah, fancies himself a son of nature, which I believe supports my theory that he was neither born in the Dark Continent nor spent a long time in it.”

“Sheltered, not sufficiently traumatized?”

Pariston chuckled. “Yeah. He didn’t seem to care much about parents or such. Said he was sick before arriving at the settlement and has at some point lost all sensation in his body.”

Cheadle nodded. “I want you to keep talking to him, and others as well.” She looked at him. “Can I trust you with that?”

“Of course, children take well to me.”

“Good.”

They walked towards the ground floor, and Cheadle was content to see that people no longer roamed the hallways. They were observing the quarantine, albeit reluctantly. People still went out of their rooms for food and baths, but there was no huddling and no groups to be seen, although she knew the soldiers had their own way of communicating with one another. They were nonchalantly belligerent and gingerly cooperative, and only because the settlement was the safest place for them to be. Cheadle thought they would be more difficult to convince, but it seemed that her arrival here had made the danger they only tangentially experienced real. They congregated like a pack of wolves, but they were, perhaps, the most scared here.

“So,” Pariston started. “Where did you say we were going?”

“To professor Steis’s ‘little farm’.”

“Dotti?”

“Him.”

“You don’t seem very excited.”

“I’m not.”

Pariston chuckled. “He’s really pushy. I’d fear for your life if you didn’t accept his invite.”

She rolled her eyes. “He’s an outcast here. The others don’t seem to like him very much or regard him highly.”

“Which would make his opinion more valuable?”

“Different, for sure.”

The man was different, and that interested Cheadle, for whatever it’s worth. He was, for one, significantly older than the rest, which perhaps contributed to his estrangement from his team members. Cheadle was beginning to see the various, interconnected webs that held them together, the people they were close to and the ones they didn’t like very much, but Dotti’s circle appeared to include only himself, and he had a tendency to disappear and creep away from any gathering (after insisting, yet again, that she visit his working space.)

And here they were, finally, where Dotti Steis had carved a little space for himself, and it was, she had to admit, beautiful. She could imagine, too, why he made it hard to reach and seemed strangely possessive of it.

A wall facing south was knocked down along with a portion of the ceiling, and replaced with a large, sprawling canopy of lush, vivid green that left fluttering shades on the ground. Along the walls were placed pots brimming with exotic flowers, purples and blues and blood red, long-stemmed and budding, waxy and papery, the kinds found nearby and faraway from here. Some, even, she was surprised to see, were indigenous to regions of mainland.

It was a little garden overflowing with what she guessed were years worth of work, and even though it was humble and even primitive in contrast, it reminded her, fondly, of the Association’s greenhouse. She couldn’t imagine it as the result of solely individual effort, yet it was Dotti alone who greeted them, surprised, stepping out of a side door where the elation on his face changed to something lesser once he saw that there were two of them. He didn’t bother to hide his disappointment at seeing Pariston with her, but he nonetheless offered a generous welcoming, gazing rapidly around him as if to humbly point their attention at all that he’s made and cultivated.

“You finally came, it’s such a surprise, really.” Dotti said, taking a step too wide for his short legs, falling eagerly on Cheadle’s hand to shake it. “It’s a pleasure to have you here, it really is. I’ve been waiting for you, to tell the truth.”

The man shook her hand vigorously. She didn’t want to be rude. “I love the gardenias.”

Dotti smiled awkwardly, beaming, his eyes wide, shooting a back glance at a lone pot where mainland white gardenias were growing in a beautiful arch. His wild black eyes darted back to her. “Very like you, doctor.”

Then he took the opportunity to hide his embarrassment by inviting them inside his office, a childish spring in his feet as he ushered them in, eagerly, reverently hunched—for them or the place into which he was letting them, she didn’t know.

As they walked through the door, Dotti skipping ahead, Pariston shared a wily smile with her. “Twen for me, Dotti for you,” he said, quietly, dreamily. “Are we finally going to find love here, Cheadle?”

“Your giddiness disturbs me.”

“Oh, but they’re just our type!” He whined further, sampling the next words in his mouth before saying them. “Repressed. Crazed.”

Cheadle chuckled despite herself. “What’s with you and Twen anyway? Are you even attracted to him or does he just smell like somebody you can manipulate?”

“I wouldn’t say ‘attracted’,” Pariston hummed, giving this way too much thought. “I am simply intrigued by Twen.”

Dotti turned to them, and remained silent for dramatic effect as he finally walked them inside yet another spacey room, one filled with nothing but saplings—small, young trees each alone in a pot of dark soil sporting a sign that catalogued its features and ‘list of treatments’. Some of their thin trunks were bent in strange directions, others were simply rootstocks with no shoots, malleable, row, all frozen in a state of adolescence.

They did not appear to be struggling for life. They did not appear alive at all.

“You’ve done all this by yourself?” Cheadle asked, impressed, wandering the narrow pathways between the pots, bending down to read the smudged handwriting covering one sign. ‘ _Ar-Ca-034, industrial well_ ’, it read.

“Most definitely not.” Dotti replied, following her with his fervent gaze. “This is, in fact, a project I shared with the dear late Clarence. He built these rooms with me and we worked on the first trees, the ones right there, at the back, as you can see.” He said, walking urgently towards those trees as if pointing wasn’t enough. He stood beside them, his posture not any better than the misshapen saplings he gazed at adoringly as they doubled over in some kind of pain. “I favored them with a special place. Evidently, they do not favor me back.” And he let out that weird giggle of his, a sound that made him simultaneously fascinating and repulsive.

Cheadle looked at the two young trees, and at first gaze it was difficult to tell whether they were real or plastic. Their wood was smooth to the touch, and they sported dark, waxy green leaves, some of which were yellow and spotted. She rubbed one between her fingers. “You were close with professor Clarence?”

“I would like to believe so, yes.” Dotti said, caressing a weak branch, lifting it up like one lifts the old skin on their eyelid to see it without wrinkles. It sagged. “Clarence was very dear to me, special, I’d say, and we worked quite well together. Truly an extraordinary man; his loss was devastating. To me, at least.” His expression turned to unconcealed contempt. “Most of the others here, they are young and careless, as I have thought, as I have believed from the beginning, really, they have not proven differently. Petty, they don’t possess a modicum of scientific spirit. Taking all these strange children in, all of them were on it, I was the only one who objected.”

“You did?”

“I mean, not all of them, but most, surely.” He said, reigning down on his zealousness. “Sulei was with me, however, she was with me. A good woman, and she is the leader, supposedly, not very good, I’d say, and yet. It is such things I mean when I criticize them.” He went on, discomfited by any gaze that lasted a second too long on anything. He looked over Cheadle’s head, even when he addressed her directly. “It is why I’m so elated with your presence. Very sincerely.”

Her eyes met Pariston’s, and if anything he seemed quite elated, too, abandoning her to this man’s frantic whimsy, strolling among the trees, hands behind his back, his figure towering over the saplings as he bent down to smell them, even in the absence of any flowers. Did he miss the garden he left behind, she wondered.

“I’d love to know your opinion on the recent events here, professor Dotti.” She said, walking alongside the old scientist when he gingerly abandoned his post beside the two special trees, murmuring an urgent plea for her to call him ‘please, just Dotti’. To egg him on further, she added: “I too am of the opinion that the refugees should not have been let into the settlement. Neither the soldiers.”

The man let out an excited huff of air. “Precisely my point, dear, precisely my point, and I said as much, then. This is a research facility, not a camp for the displaced.” He said in frustration, unconsciously following Pariston’s trail. “I do not say this out of any heartlessness, believe me; I’m soft, my wife used to say, but there is something to be said about protocol. Clarence would have agreed with me, surely.”

Cheadle bent down to read another sign. ‘ _Ar-Ca-012, Lake Harkenburg_ ’.

“And the infection?” She asked. “Do you believe it came with the children?”

“I have no doubt about it.” Dotti said confidently. “They arrived here already diseased; something or the other they picked up from outside and carried over. I have smartly maintained distance, as you can see now, I work here all the time alone.”

She nodded. “But they came in three waves, as I’ve been told. Were they all diseased, too?”

Dotti mulled over the question, turning abruptly to free his shirt from a passing branch. “I would say the first wave. They were the largest in terms of numbers, if memory serves me correctly. Very many of them, all about the same size and age, too, I noticed. Like a perfect crop.”

“Crop?”

“Yes, yes,” he smiled, and the two of them finally arrived where Pariston had stopped, which startled Dotti for a moment, his eyes taking Pariston’s tall figure in, as if having forgotten that he was present at all. “Like a beautiful crop of cherries, for miles, every cherry a twin of its sisters.”

Pariston stared back at the man, seemingly amused at the scientist’s wistful gaze that found itself in Pariston’s. Dotti looked away, displeased with whatever he saw reflecting his cherry orchard back at him.

“So I take it you had no personal contact with them of any kind?”

“I did not, true.” Dotti said. “I observed them at their arrival, but retreated when my objections fell on deaf ears.”

Yet another sign. ‘ _Ar-Ca-09, Lake Urm’_.

“Are they all the same tree?”

“Yes.”

The tree to which the sign belonged had a strange bluish tinge in the fumbling veins of its trunk. It looked sturdier than most others, but it only sprouted sharp, leafless branches.

“I have been attempting, for years, to throw as many variables as possible into the growth process.” Dotti said. “All that you see are plum scions grafted in multiple ways into a variety of flowering, fruit-producing indigenous trees, watered from different sources, but none have worked quite well. All except one.”

Dotti’s voice fell a notch, for the drama of it, and he clapped his hands suddenly. “I want to show you my baby. My daughter. A chimera.” He declared, teetering on the edge of everything he wanted to reveal, lost as to which path to take among his trees. “Everyone has focused on ground vegetables and such, but Clarence and I looked up, towards trees, towards fruit.”

Finally out of the maze of pots, he led them with slow, slinking steps to a room with a small, tightly-closed entrance. Dotti fumbled with the lock, and when the door opened with a metallic creak it opened to darkness with no clear dimensions.

“It’s well known that all attempts to domesticate the continent’s plants on mainland have failed, but not the other way around, although the latter with some difficulty, but I believe I have reached a successful formula.”

And then, with a click, he lit up the room.

A vibrant, surreal bacchanalia of colors beamed at them from the midst of the room where a single, strange tree stood. Shooting up from the ground, its full height encumbered by a ceiling too low for it, its sprawling branches veered off into every other direction, crawling the ceiling like intermingled spider-webs, drooping in corners towards the earth, some, even, burying back into it.

The garish neon tubes around it appeared to exert no effect on the majesty of its colors, like the very light emanated from within it, like it existed separate from all that was around it.

Cheadle and Pariston stood before it, open-mouthed, struck by the idiosyncrasy and ebullience, by the luscious deviancy of it.

Beautiful like the first wickedness that ends innocence, it seemed to draw everything in the room towards it, a gravitational pull that lugged the soil towards the center, creating a wide, deep gutter around the base of its trunk.

“Tell me, tell me how extraordinary it is, my daughter.” Dotti pleaded, and it was impossible to fault the venerating madness in his eyes. “Tell me how you’ve never seen anything like it.” He frothed, turning to them, his back hunched, his face contorted into something malicious in its mindlessness.

“Is it plum?” Cheadle asked.

“Can we make jam out of it?” Pariston followed.

Dotti stared at them, dumbfounded. He stuttered out something that neither heard, then he shook his head, as if to wake up from this euphoria. “It’s… it’s plum, yes. One fifth plum, to be precise. As for jam, um…” the scientist trailed off, studying Pariston once again as if he’s only just appeared. “The fruits are edible, so I suppose jam could, indeed, be made. Howev—”

“Wonderful!” Pariston interrupted, irreverent of Dotti’s indignation, just about to spill forth from his open mouth.

Cheadle put a quick, gently admonishing hand on Pariston’s arm. “He doesn’t mean to offend,” she said with a smile, attempting to mitigate the situation. “he loves to spoil himself gastronomically, so you can imagine being here has been difficult, for him.”

The attempt failed.

“What do you do, sir?” Dotti approached Pariston, hands behind his back, a praying mantis approaching a prey it was yet to know was far too dangerous for it. “You are not a scientist, as is very clear. You are a _nurse_. Stick to that.”

Pariston smiled down at the man, nonplussed by the demeaning tone. “Of course. And as a _nurse_ does, I will nurse you when you become sick.”

The hand on his arm turned into a grip.

“The tree is extraordinary, Dotti.” Cheadle said, and either the genuine compliment or the utterance of his first name made him turn to her. She let go of Pariston’s arm and offered the old scientist a kind smile. “Tell me more about her, please.”

Her sincerity appeared to help loosen the ire that knotted the man’s whole body. Pariston stood and observed her take the man with a hand on his back, a proffer, a reminder of colleagueship, drawing him away from the source of his chagrin.

How admirable, he thought, the way she ate herself up and down to stop a frail twig from breaking off.

“She can live in complete darkness.” Dotti spoke once again, regaining some of his previous confidence, but—and it seemed so to Pariston—he now liked Cheadle a little less. “Moreover, amazingly, I might add, she fructifies in darkness as well, never-endingly, almost. If I cut a branch, another two grow. If I rip all flowers off her, pollinated or otherwise, more sprout in their stead the next day. She flowers year-round, and bears fruit constantly.”

“How do you water her?” She asked, turning a low-hanging plum in her fingers. The fruit glistened appetizingly.

“I don’t water her anymore.” Dotti answered, visibly bothered at Cheadle touching his fruits. “I weaned her.”

“Weaned her off water?”

“Yes, and now I feed her.”

She turned to him. “Feed her what?”

“Her dying brethren.” He answered, his gaze drifting over the revered tree. “All the others before her, the ones who take and take resources but refuse to grow, they’re now part of her, helping her surpass them.”

“What about pollination?”

“Manually, like all other plants here.” Dotti said. “She has no natural pollinators.”

Pariston imagined the scientist painstakingly pollinating every flower, over and over again, every day; a lone insect in the dark, buzzing in the void around its object of worship, endlessly devoted until the insect itself becomes food for its indifferent god.

“Do the others know of this tree’s existence, professor?” Cheadle asked, wary, small under branches that seemed about to clamp down on her.

“No, but there is no reason to care anymore.” Dotti said, taking hold of Cheadle’s hand. “Now that you’re here, doctor, you can support me. You’ll stand with me, surely.” He forced his eyes to look into hers, the small eyes that flittered everywhere. “She’s immortal. She will never die. If we can create more, as I imagine, think of all the problems that we can solve, the _big_ world issues; hunger, food scarcity, dying wildlife, loss of ecosystems, even human cell research. We can end death itself, doctor.”

Cheadle only stared at him, her hand limp in his, the length of her arm the only thing separating her from his cavernous mania. “I would like to come here again, professor.”

“Of course, of course, yes. Come whenever you want.”

“I would also like to take a few samples, if you don’t mind.”

To that he was less enthusiastic. His eyes flitted frantically between Cheadle and the tree, like it was an ultimatum and he had to choose one of them to please, a single right answer and he was going to get it wrong.

“I… I suppose there’s no harm.” Dotti finally said after a long pause. “But I’d like to be the one to collect them, if you’ll allow me, of course.”

“Sure, thank you.”

The man let go of her hand slowly, and like a caterpillar too stuffed to move, he went about gathering samples from his beloved—fruit and flowers and leaves, bark and sap. Soil, too, Cheadle reminded him.

“I also want to ask you, about a recently deceased scientist.” She said.

“Gregory, I’m sure?” Dotti said, bending down to bag her a handful of soil. “I’ve heard. What a loss. It really is. Very young. It was the right thing, to help her die. What pain she endured.”

“Did you happen to visit her?”

“Only in the early days. She was not very welcoming of visitors, I’ll say. Even after such deterioration, she continued to be very strong-willed. Admirable, for certain, but it was clear she was in much agony.”

“Did you work together?”

“We did.” Dotti said, raising his arm to pluck a plum, two. Pariston wanted more. Cheadle urged him to pluck more. “She was very intelligent, I recall, but I sensed strange things about her. Very secretive, and had relations, outside the settlement.”

“Relations?” Cheadle asked. “How do you mean?”

“I believe she had a lover. Perhaps a raider, or some such.” He said. “She did go out much more than any other person here, so it seemed like that to me, at least.”

Cheadle nodded. “I’ve been told she was already sick before the arrival of refugees. Do you recall any such thing?”

“Ah, yes, I think I do.” Dotti said. “She was of a very evasive nature. It wasn’t difficult to see that she was hiding things, for sure.” The irony of just describing himself wasn’t lost on the man as he giggled sheepishly. “Takes one to know one, of course.”

“Gregory talked about a ‘well’ in her room. A water well, I presume.” Cheadle continued. “She said she drank from it and that’s how she became ill.”

Dotti let out a strange, breathless little laugh. “A water well in her room? That would be a strange thing, wouldn’t it?”

“You’ve successfully cultivated a tree in darkness, professor.” Cheadle reminded him amicably.

“I don’t know, doctor, there’s the industrial well outside, for sure, but it seems it’s not what you’re searching for. I can help you to the water treatment facility.” And with that he handed her what he’s gathered, all mindfully placed in a small basket.

“I appreciate that,” she said, taking it from him, holding in front of her like she was ready to set out for a picnic. “I want to ask you one more thing, if you don’t mind. Did professor Clarence keep records? Maintained a diary of some sort? A journal, perhaps?”

“Most definitely. Clarence was an avid recorder. Wrote down everything.” Dotti answered. “Although I do not know where his papers could be. The repository, most likely. Have they not given you the key yet? I can take you there if you wish, of course.”

“Thank you, but Hima Siwayama had promised to help me in that regard.” Cheadle said with a polite smile. “I’m supposed to visit the archive today, actually.”

Dotti nodded absentmindedly. “I see, I see.”

“Well, thank you for everything.” Cheadle said. “We’ll meet again here for sure. Stay safe.”

“You too, doctor.” Dotti’s eyes passed Pariston contemptuously, and he seemed to have no interest in walking them out, as he simply shifted his attention back to the tree, attending to where he saw it ruffled by their intrusion.

Out of that coffin, back to the rows of tree pots and then at last to the garden, Pariston walked with a smile, waiting for Cheadle to start what he knew she was going to say. In the garden, beside the arch of gardenias, he plucked one, a creamy white velvet that smelled like a distant summer night.

Away from Dotti and his peculiar gardens, Cheadle halted and turned around to face him.

“Don’t ever do that again. Ever.”

“Do what?” He feigned obliviousness.

She fixed him with a hard stare. “ _Provoke_ people, demean their work, act disrespectful on purpose because you’re a little bored.”

“But you agree he was disrespectful and demeaning as well, invoking nursing to offend me and put me in my place.”

“He was,” she agreed. “But you started it, and you irked him further with your morbid reply. A simple sorry would have sufficed.”

“Why put the blame solely on me when, like me, you wished to knock him down a peg or two?” Pariston asked, twirling the flower between his fingers. “Like me, you thought he was silly, even when what he created was great. You encouraged me. Asking him if they were plums after that show he put on? Genius. I simply loved it.”

Cheadle’s frown deepened, her glare unrelenting. “You love to antagonize people, that’s what you love, Pariston.”

“You wanted more of those plums, too.” He bent down, offering her a coy, inviting smile. “You’re tired of the people, you’re tired of the food. You are bored, too.” His fingers went up to her face, brushing away a long hair stuck behind her glasses. She stepped away from him. “I was helping you, and you never appreciate my help.”

“You’re not helping me. You’re making my job worse, Pariston.”

“Remind me what you were saying yesterday, Cheadle, about appeasing egos?” He hummed in faux contemplation. “Right. You said you’d rather have your face eaten.”

When she had no reply to that, his smile grew bigger, and he took a step closer to put the white gardenia in her hair, tucked it right above her right ear. She looked splendid.

“Very like you, doctor.”

**III**

Pariston was in no hurry to follow her, but she wasn’t going to let him be alone.

In her head Cheadle saw their room, Ging on her bed, Pariston kneeling on the floor, and the more her neck and ear tingled from where his fingers brushed them the harder it was to cut that reel and shove it back, but the memory refused to stow away, comfortable to burgeon exactly where she pushed it—in the dark, periphery corners of her mind.

There, it propagated itself into things entirely the making of her own imagination.

Pariston relished in her silence, she thought, as he let her lead him towards the labs. The gardenia was no longer in her hair; she had tossed it in the basket where it nestled between the blue, glistening plums, its own muted ceremony among the festival of purple, pink, and orange tree blossoms. Even away from her nose, the scent of it lingered.

Hima was waiting for them. A ‘casual botanist’, she had called herself, and was more interested in the science of archiving and cataloguing than anything to do with plants, and had at one point assigned herself to the repository where everything pertaining to the settlement was kept. She had stayed with Cheadle all of last night, after Sulei and the other scientist left, showing her around the labs, studying the samples with her, freeing new space in which to keep the new records and profiles, joking about the blob they extracted out of her colleague and around which they roamed all night, theorizing.

So far, she seemed the most trustworthy person here, stable in a way that was lost to the others. Markov, as well, only he was less forthcoming and much less personable, meek in a way that irked Cheadle. She wanted to surround herself with them, to draw them to her, to establish mutual trust. They didn’t hold any great affection towards Sulei, she gathered, but they deferred to her regardless. Despite the current situation, the head biologist had a way of making them feel safe and protected.

They did not have to progress, they only had to stay alive—that was Sulei’s way—but that balance had become much more tenuous lately. It’s in this gap that Cheadle could operate.

“What will we do with the plums?” Pariston asked when they entered one of the labs.

“Keep them sterilized, for now.” She answered, putting the basket on the closest flat surface. She shot him a glance. “I know you want to try them, but it’s still unclear whether they’re safe to consume or not.”

Pariston hummed. “He said they’re edible.”

“He’s not exactly a reliable source of information, is he?”

“Where does he go with all the produce?” Pariston wondered aloud, picking one of the plums out of the basket. “Does he eat them? Does he gobble the plums in the darkness like an animal?” He scrutinized the fruit, holding it up to his face. Against his lips, under his nose, he smelled it, eyes aflutter.

“Don’t bite it, please.”

Pariston returned the plum to the basket, his cheeks reddened. “I’m tempted.”

“Thanks to you, we might not be able to have more.” Cheadle said, separating the contents of the basket and readying them for the fridge.

He rested his elbow on the table and leaned on it, watching her. “You’re a Hunter, Cheadle. You don’t need the permission of some old crock to pluck fruit.”

“Just because one is a Hunter doesn’t mean they own the world and everything in it.”

“But it sure felt like it.”

She won’t ask if he misses it. She won’t ask what it meant to him, what the loss of it meant to him. She didn’t care. That was a conscious position. Fuck him, and fuck the world he thinks he once owned.

“What’s that?” Pariston asked, already walking towards the object of inquiry.

Cheadle followed him with her gaze, carrying the samples to the fridge. “An overgrown sentient tumor. We extracted it from Gregory’s stomach cavity last night.”

The malleable, swarthy creature was placed at the far end of the lab, in a large glass container, where it blobbed on the floor of it, unmoving but for its dark, beady eyes. It watched Pariston approach it, its eyes fixed on this new presence. It seemed to be breathing, its small body pulsing faintly.

Pariston bent forward, his face a foot away from the container. “What is it?”

“My theory? A trophically transmitted parasite.” She answered.

“Trophically?”

“Through indigestion,” Cheadle explained. “Whatever she drank, or ate, had lodged itself in her stomach and grew there, sustaining itself on the fat in her body, on muscles, on skin and bone tissue, as well. There was nothing much left of her body; she ought to have died of innumerable health complications long ago.”

Pariston hummed. “Most parasites keep their hosts alive, don’t they?”

“And some use them to breed, and kill them even when it isn’t beneficial.”

“It’s pretty gross. Is it a fetus?”

She didn’t like the look he sent her, the devious way the corners of his mouth pulled up or how he leaned far too close to the creature as if to let it whisper something in his ear.

“It does look like one,” Cheadle said. “We might have caused it something of a premature birth, but it’s also possible that it had been simply waiting for another host; we still don’t know if it can survive meaningfully independent of one.”

“Do you think it’s connected to the virus?”

“We don’t know yet. It’s not a symptom that’s appeared on others, but it could be a late-stage development of the infection. It could also be something entirely independent of it, something only Gregory had, maybe even what initially caused her illness.”

Cheadle was in the process of constructing an approximate timeline, one that connected Gregory, allegedly the index patient, to the rest of the infected. It was difficult, thankless work, but she was getting there. Moreover, she needed the children’s side of the story here, and so she needed Pariston.

“Have you ever looked at a blood sample under a microscope?” She asked him, diverting his attention away from the little creature.

He turned his face to her. “In school.”

“Come.” She took a serum tube and skin tissue out of the fridge and closed it, then pulled a second chair to a table, where she had studied Gregory’s blood samples last night.

Pariston took his time walking to her, a little woeful at parting ways with the living tumor. He sat in the chair she pulled for him while she took the other. A drop of blood on a slide, she invited him to take a look.

He smiled. “Haven’t seen blood this close since I was fourteen.” But then his smile waned, and he seemed to notice what she wanted him to. “A high white blood cell count.” He said with a kind of curious bemusement. “Means infection, right?”

“Yes,” Cheadle said. “But they’re eosinophils, which specifically indicates a reaction against a parasitic infection, hence, my theory. We’re usually able to see infected cells or related pathogens in a blood sample, but there’s nothing.” She removed the slide and put another, balancing a hand on his back as she did so. She pressed him down a little, like a flotsam under a wave. “The case with her skin tissue is different, however.”

Pariston looked into the microscope once again, and this time to a very different sight.

Elongated and fissured, Gregory’s cells appeared like splinters, frayed and pulled apart, torn and shredded over a cutting board. Along the open, wide grooves of them swam other skin cells, looking slightly different, healthier, burying through the few intact cells and surrounding them, engaged in what appeared like slow feasting. No pathogen appeared in sight, only damage.

“I thought I would find what would prove necrosis, because the appearance of her skin suggested it, but I didn’t.” She said. “The samples collected from the other ill scientist show much lower levels of white blood cells but similar skin tissue results.”

“They’re eating her.” He murmured, zooming in to observe this microcosmic show of hunger.

“Replacing her, more precisely,” Cheadle said. “Most of her cells had become, essentially, impersonators that resemble the original but carry little of her genetic material. The pathogen is mimicking cells after infecting them, which is highly unusual. A virus cannot live without a host to carry on its functions for it, but this one appears to not only use skin cells to propagate itself, but it's also copying the cells genetic makeup and moving around performing their functions with very slight variations, transforming the host gradually into an altogether different ecosystem.”

Pariston lifted up his head. “A doppelganger.”

“Basically,” she said. “And by the time the body’s immune system catches up to this strange shift, it’s too late. It might be a new strain of virulent mycosis, seeing as it’s absent in her blood.” Her eyes sought something else, away from him, to the little creature she extracted. “At the end, Gregory’s body was really no longer hers, genetically, at least. I wonder if she knew that.”

Pariston imagined that loss of control, the knowledge that his body wasn’t his own, that it was something else, something new coming out of him and expelling him simultaneously. To be replaced on the molecular level. He had an urge to look at the sample again, but he couldn’t, for a new face popped into the room.

“Doctor Cheadle?”

Must be the archivist.

“Hima,” Cheadle smiled at the woman. “We were just storing some samples.”

The young scientist waved her thin wrist. “No problem, want me to wait for you in the repository?”

“Sure, thank you.”

And then the little head of black hair disappeared behind the door. Pariston got up from his chair and helped Cheadle put back everything in place. Leaving the lab, he threw a glance at his little friend at the back, where it wasn’t clear if its eyes were perceiving him or not, only that it was breathing.

Hima Siwayama was waiting for them in the repository, and she acknowledged him with a respectful, curt nod and addressed him with his name, her boney fingers weltering against a shelf a little too high for her where she was attempting to pull a file out. He slid it out for her.

“Thanks,” she said, taking the file from his hand with a casual smile, and then sidestepping him to address Cheadle. “So, here’s professor Clarence’s file.”

“I wanted to ask you,” Cheadle took the file. “Was Dotti Steis involved with professor Clarence’s funeral?”

Hima tapped her humming mouth with a finger. “Not really? I mean, he was _there_ , and he cried a lot, but he didn’t _do_ anything. None of the technical stuff involved with taking care of a dead body.”

“Were you?”

“No,” Hima chuckled, her dark eyes crinkling in the archive’s dim lights. “The man died so suddenly and we barely spoke that by the time I cared enough he was long in the ground.”

Cheadle opened the file. “Who took care of his body then?”

“Sulei,” Hima said, rolling her eyes as if there was obviously no other answer. “She really held into everything, after the professor’s death. There wasn’t a ceremony or anything, I mean, can you really even afford one in this place, but she made sure everything was taken care of. They were pretty close.”

Cheadle didn’t hide her dismay at this. She had extended a peace offering to the head scientist by including her in the choice to end Gregory’s life, had shown the woman compassion when she didn’t have to, but it seemed that this wasn’t enough to bridge the gap between them. Sulei was a hard rock, and everything seemed to lead back to her one way or the other.

“Dotti claimed he was close with the professor, too.” She said, leafing through the file with a soft frown. “Was everyone?”

Hima shrugged, leaning against a lacquered table. “The man _was_ popular.”

“Did you like him?”

“I don’t like condescending paternalism, so no.”

The young scientist gazed at Pariston with a soft, cheeky smile coupled with a resigned shrug, as if that dislike was just out of her hands. Her face was a strawberry with no inch of skin wasted, a light brown taut over the defined bones of her cheeks and chin, and eyes that were innocent and cunning in equal measure, the eyes of smart kids who knew they were smart but didn’t care to do much with it. He wouldn’t be surprised to learn if she had spent her adolescence involved in delinquency that gradually evolved into more serious crimes. How she got to study botany or even enter college at all was without a doubt a story he’d love to hear.

“Dotti claimed the professor kept records, a journal or some such,” Cheadle said. “Were they collected and preserved after his death?”

Hima pushed herself away from the table and strolled towards the rows of metallic shelves that lined the walls and center of the room. “I think there are some papers, although I don’t know about a diary. Nothing of that sort was brought here.” With a swift hand she pulled out an old folder, opened it, sifted through it quickly, then promptly returned it. “To be honest, doctor, if a journal existed it wouldn’t be strange if that old creep kept it with him. He was a little obsessed.”

Cheadle hummed. “I did consider it, but, benefit of the doubt and all that.”

Hima laughed, pulling out another folder. “I’d think you’re too good for this place, but, y’know,” She gestured with a helpless wave of arms. “Sulei might be a huge bitch, but she wasn’t wrong, last night.” She said that without any animosity, even with some sympathy, squinting at the open folder in her hands.

Cheadle didn’t even look up from the folder. “Are you asserting loyalties, Hima?”

“I’m just trying to stay alive, doctor.”

“As do I.” Cheadle looked up from the file, smiling. “Can I keep this?”

Hima shrugged. “Sure, have at it.” She walked back towards them, a different folder in her hand. “I only found this, but you’re free to look around yourself.”

Pariston didn’t know what Sulei had said last night, and it didn’t seem like either woman was going to divulge any further, so he looked away, far to the back of the room where two computers were shoved close to the wall. Curious, he walked towards them.

“What do you use the computers for?” He asked, running his finger over old camera equipment that lay strewn over the computer tables.

Hima turned to address him. “Imaging, sending reports, spider solitaire.”

He laughed. “You only have two in the settlement?”

“Yep.”

Was it what they used to send Cheadle the initial report? If so, it meant that Ging had entered this very room and used one of the computers to sneak his message inside the digital report, and this possibility wasn’t lost on Cheadle, either, as she looked up from what occupied her hands to observe the old machines behind him. Then her eyes, like his, were searching for places from which Ging could have entered other than the main door. There were none.

“Are you the only one who comes here, Hima?” Cheadle asked.

“All scientists can, they do have to ask me for the key beforehand, though.”

“And then return it?”

“Yeah, the arrival of soldiers here complicated our living situation. We’re just more careful with them around, regarding equipment and documents and such.”

Cheadle rested her files over the table. “Nina spoke of a team of amateur scientists who spent a period of time here. Did you meet them personally?”

“Oh yeah, they were a treat.” Hima chuckled. “Talked a bunch of new-age nonsense and then left, never to be seen or heard from again. Do you think they’re dead? I think they’re dead.”

“Did they have children with them?”

Hima shook her head. “No, they were all really young, a bunch of twenty-somethings, kinda cultish?” She twisted her mouth in amused disgust. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they were antinatalists or some shit. Are you thinking the kids here might be connected to them?”

“Nina suggested the kids might be connected to groups like them. She had strange opinions, about the matter.”

Hima snickered. “Let me guess, experiment subjects.”

“Yeah.”

“She’s a misanthrope.”

“Always?”

Hima shrugged. “Who knows, we never really clicked. Her husband, though.” And she winked shamelessly at both of them.

Cheadle suppressed a chuckle. “Did you ‘click’ with him, Hima?”

“I wish!” Hima chuckled. “He’s like the only fuckable man in the settlement. If I knew we could marry here I would’ve snatched him right up front. Even his _name_ is sexy.” She gazed up dreamily. “ _Dal Ormana_. Don’t you just wanna lick it?”

They all laughed. If Pariston had seen Nina’s husband in the hallways or some room, he didn’t know it. The man was yet to show up for the mandatory medical checkup. Now he was curious, but then Hima’s expression morphed into something more somber and distant.

“It gets pretty lonely here,” she said, hands between her thighs. “You’d think with soldiers and shit, the pool of people to like would grow larger, but they’re all awful.”

“You’re not close with anyone here?” Cheadle asked with sympathy.

“Does occasional shallow human interaction with the guy who basically moonlights as your weed dealer count?”

Cheadle had no reply to that.

“I mean, Twen is fine, but I’m pretty sure he lost his virginity to a literal hole in the wall, so I’m not touching that.”

Oh. Twen. Pariston smiled. “He sells you weed?”

“Nothing like what you find on mainland,” Hima answered. “It’s an indigenous genus, similar to mainland cannabis but way more potent and dangerous. One of the soldiers died chewing it. That bastard used some of our research on it and then went on to farm that shit on the rooftop.” She exclaimed, nonchalant about her jealousy and morbid admiration. “He doesn’t ‘sell’ it, per se, but he distributes it in exchange for various things.”

Pariston felt a surge of pride, singular and unexpected, as if Twen was his student, as if he had personal stakes in Twen being more than meets the eye.

“I say we quit this vegetable cultivation nonsense and start producing these new varieties of cannabis on a mass scale.” Hima said, excitement animating her face. “I mean it. I can use the money, and you can use this new industry to fund whatever crazy shit you Hunters do.”

Cheadle sighed. Beside a woman two decades younger than her who knew nothing of the bureaucratic hell of getting anything of this sort off the ground, she seemed a little lost for words. Pariston smiled at Hima but knew that her dream was impossible. For her, anyway. There will never be funding for such a project, not legally, and never on an industrial scale. If there had been adequate funding, the Association would not have chosen a bunch of civilian scientists to carry research on the continent. Instead, Hunters would have been sent, but Hunters are expensive, and their death costly. The standards were quite different for criminals with college degrees. Manufacturing and selling drugs—and a kind still illegal in many nations— would be incredibly bad PR for the Association, pure and simple.

Cheadle would rather gouge her eyes out before living through and handling any more losses.

“Okay, whatever,” Hima rolled her eyes at their silence. “Obviously you’re not interested in my idea. Maybe the Hunter Association is just too big to be my business partner.”

“It is, but you don’t have to worry about that.” Cheadle said. “We were talking about the child refugees,” she let out a long breath. “What do you think of them?”

Hima leaned forward in her chair, her hands dangling over her knees. For once, she looked serious. “For one, I think it’s really fucking strange that they’re all boys.”

A subtle smirk found its way to Cheadle’s face, like she had finally heard what she wanted to hear, like she had hit a target. When Hima didn’t get a reply, she added, hesitant: “They’re all boys, right?”

“In the sense that they all have penises, yes.”

Hima squinted. “That’s weird, isn’t it?”

“I think it’s weird, too.” Cheadle said. “Weirder still that you’re the first person here to say it.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

Hima leaned back, eyes wide, gazing up to the ceiling. She jerked her head forward in a sudden motion. “That does kinda put Nina’s stupid theory in perspective, doesn’t it?” 

Cheadle chuckled. “A little, yes. I still don’t find it very compelling, however. You can peruse the test results for their samples; if you look at them, you’ll see that there’s nothing strange. No anomalies in the blood, nothing to indicate damage or systemic harm to their bodies by external means. They’re quite healthy, even.”

“If you noticed this, doctor, why didn’t you tell anybody?” Hima asked, looking oddly purposeful. “It’s fine if you don’t trust people here; I have little trust, too, and I’ve been with these people for eight years.” She continued. “But exactly because of that, I really don’t think you’ll win favor here by playing mind games with people.”

Cheadle smiled. “Why haven’t _you_ mentioned it, considering you saw it as well, and long before I did, too?”

Hima had no immediate answer to that. She just sat and stared, loose hairs tickling her forehead. She offered a weak shrug, a preamble to some explanation, but nothing came out of her mouth. She seemed confused about wording the logic behind withholding what she had noticed.

“You’re suspicious and cautious, and those are good instincts. You’re curious, too.” Cheadle told her, amiable and inviting. “I’d like for you to continue helping me in the lab. Come tonight, I’ll be there.”

Pariston smiled reassuringly at the young scientist when she looked up at him. Something like purpose moved the gleam in her eyes.

“I’ll be there.”

**III**

Public baths. Cheadle wanted to hurl.

She stood a little away south of the planting fields, towel and clean clothes draped over her arm, fingers entwined in front of her, watching with resigned, composed mortification a group of half-naked ex-soldiers stroll jovially in packs out of the baths and into her line of vision, the warm colors of the setting sun sweeping over their exposed skin.

Wet-haired, boot laces untied, towels and shirts slung casually over shoulders, some of them slowed down to regard her with roguish, coy stares, one of them even whistled. They laughed and twittered among themselves, drawing near her.

Hima had said it best an hour ago when warning them of taking late baths. _Don’t do them_ , the young scientist had said. Cheadle didn’t take the warning seriously, but perhaps she should have.

“Want me to scrub your back, doctor?” One of them called, making a silly circular motion with the upturned palm of his hand. “Or do you like it in the checkup room?”

Cheadle offered no response, but didn’t break eye contact either. As they became closer, a couple feet away from her, she could see that Twen was among them. He didn’t join in the chatter but didn’t care to stop it when it became more graphic, hiding a vindictive smirk behind his hand as he lit a cigarette.

Pariston, who had been more finicky about what clothes to pick and thus was left by her in the room, appeared beside her, sunny and smiling. “Oh look, we have company.” He said, surveying the scene around them. “Good evening, gentlemen. Lovely evening we have today, no?”

Cheadle hated that he did that. There was no reason other than his insufferable desire to draw attention to himself. She hated it because it was enough to stop the men from going on their way. Instead, they stopped and stared, wolfish and cruel.

Several of them cackled. “The doctor’s little bitch is here.”

They whistled at him, too.

She made to walk past them, but the one who called for her blocked her way. His broad, naked chest occupied her vision. _Ugly as sin_ , Hima had called them.

Cheadle looked up.

“Don’t ignore me.” He hissed, pouting his lips, seemingly trying to be both seductive and menacing. Cheadle blinked.

“Arwin, was it?” She asked, already bored with him. “I’d love it if you got out of my way.”

He smirked. “And if I don’t?”

She tried to bypass him, but he blocked her again. She wasn’t going to use force. She didn’t want any display of power.

“You’re a Hunter. Not gonna fight?” He taunted her, bucking his hips back and forth, laughed and tilted his head. Then he pouted in mock sadness when she once again attempted to move past him, burying his hands between his thighs, and then whispered, “Is it your dangly bits that make you such a sour shrew?”

“Aren’t you a little too old to be calling genitals that?”

Pariston couldn’t have chosen a worse point to interject. Cheadle felt greater ire at him than the man in front of her.

“It’s a little embarrassing, if you ask me.” Pariston added.

The men stopped jeering for a moment to regard him derisively.

To them he was a minion. He was less than, and the fact that he didn’t show a sliver of fear or anger irritated them even more. She could feel a sense of collective wounded pride slowly overtake them. It made people violent.

“The fuck you just said?”

“I said it’s embarrassing.” He repeated, slowly as if he’s talking to a child. “All your buddies think that, too.”

Cheadle’s jaw tightened and her chest clenched. She didn’t want a confrontation, not over this and certainly not with the settlement’s most volatile inhabitants, but the atmosphere foretold of a possible brawl. The ex-soldiers didn’t like back talking, and they seemed suddenly aware that they were facing Hunters yet were too proud to bow out.

The two of them could take these men out. Easily. Cleanly, even. No nen and no hatsu. But it wasn’t the right thing to do.

Pariston thought differently.

“If you’re gonna speculate over people’s genitals, you might as well bet your life over it.” Pariston said. “If you’re so curious, you’d bet your very soul over it. That would make it so much more fun, don’t you think?” His smile was heartless. “That’s how Hunters do it.”

He wanted to escalate things and he didn’t care where it took them. Pariston never saw consequences, but Cheadle knew he saw the punch flying his way.

She grabbed the balled fist before it collided with his face.

Pariston hadn’t moved an inch, the fist and her fingers wrapped tightly around it right under his nose. His eyes crinkled with a smile as the man’s arm hung aimlessly in the air, the force behind his punch flowing back to his shoulder, causing him to wince in pain. He swallowed, and then withdrew his jittering hand in fear and held it to his chest.

“It’s best not to move in large groups, for your own safety.” Cheadle said, her hand back at her side. “Excuse us, please.”

Mouths slightly open, they made way for them, mindlessly, almost, the cloying weight of Cheadle’s nen hanging over their chests. Pariston met Twen’s furtive gaze among their pale faces, then he smiled and nodded courteously as he brushed past them. “Gentlemen.”

The threatening energy roiling over them kept every soldier in place, even once the two of them walked past. Pariston could feel it just like them, her nen like poisonous slime, and within it, his own, a void, and an excitement that raked him from head to toes.

If there was an animal nearby, it would have fled.

“Everyone in this place is so horny.” Pariston marveled out loud once they entered the baths, looking around him at the rows of showerheads and old benches. It was cold in here, colder than outside, stuffy and wet.

Cheadle stood in the middle of the open bath, her back to him. “This is the second time in a single day that you do something stupid for the sake of it and which could potentially jeopardize my work.”

He placed his clean clothes at the driest surface he found. “You’re the one who used your nen.”

She turned to him, furious, arms open. “Because they would have attacked us otherwise.”

Pariston looked at her, nonplussed. “I defended you, you defended me. I don’t see the problem; they were pretty rude to us both.”

Fuming, Cheadle threw her towel and clothes over a wall that separated the bath into two areas with a corridor between them, but which was—in a strange and bold architectural choice—erected opposite the showerheads so that it neither shielded anyone from eyes nor really segregated genders. There was only one place to undress, and there stood Cheadle, fumbling with the buttons of her shirt.

“I didn’t ‘defend’ you, and you sure as hell didn’t defend me. We didn’t _need_ to be defended.” She said with gritted teeth. “I stopped a pathetic fight that would have broken out for no good reason, a fight _you_ riled up.” With an angry finger pointed at him, she continued, “We don’t want to antagonize people. We’re not going to attack them no matter what. I could have better handled the situation without your unnecessary input.”

“Why didn’t you just let him punch me then?”

Cheadle glared at him, shirt half-open, hesitant between jumping at his throat or staying put. “Maybe I should have. Maybe I would have loved to see you with a broken jaw, Pariston.” She spat his name out like venom, then turned around to start taking off her clothes but decided otherwise, turning back to him with a half-hearted laugh. “Don’t even fucking deny it. You wanted me to use my nen.”

He smiled. “And it was quite wonderful. I doubt they’ll bother you ever again.”

Her fingers were already finished undoing the buttons of her shirt. “Go to the farthest showerhead on the other side.” She instructed him, hesitant initially to undress in his presence, and hated the way that even in anger her mind kept flashing back to images of last night, of what she saw in the room, more so that it emboldened her to simply disregard whether she was naked in front of him or not. Even more, he was still fully clothed, looking.

Hurriedly she stepped out of her clothes, threw them haphazardly over the wall, put her glasses in the driest spot around her, and walked to the showerhead. She turned the little rusty knob, then stood to the side when a drizzle of freezing cold water poured down, clattering on the floor and around her feet. She retreated against the wall and away from the water, refused to meet his gaze or look, even as he began undressing, refused to acknowledge him, reaching for a yellow bar of soap balancing on a tight ledge beside her. When her water finally fell hot, he turned on his.

In spite of the thick walls around them, Cheadle felt as if she was in the cold open. Ropes of hot water falling over her face, she closed her eyes and wondered again about Gregory. Could it truly be something in the water? The people here drank and cooked and showered and watered the crops all with the same sweetened sea water. She was yet to gather local water samples, and she was interested in the various water sources Dotti used for his trees. For those, she will have to go out of the settlement. She also, still, needed to see Gregory’s room, and Clarence’s, whose papers—unsatisfyingly meager and clipped—she was yet to read closely.

Why did she decide to come alone without a prepared team and with only a criminal who’s not even trained in anything close to a medical field? Cheadle could already see the fallout of this mistake, and it was a grand fucking mistake. She knew that.

He said she was bored, and she hated the truth in it, because it implied much more than itself.

“What do you want?” She opened her eyes to look at Pariston who was much closer than she told him to be.

“Use my soap. Wash your hair with it, at least.” And he extended to her a purple soap bar. “The ones here smell awful.”

Cheadle didn’t take it, unable to stop herself from observing his body, standing before her, fully exposed, the real thing he seemed to be offering.

He was close enough that it made him clearer without her glasses, and now that he was without his fancy layers of protection she could more clearly see the muscle loss, but it was easy to notice, too, that he had continued to exercise and kept himself diligently well-fed, was still as tall and stately as day one. His once gleaming tan had regressed into a warm whiteness that she suspected was always his natural skin tone.

For someone who was once a Hunter, Pariston’s skin was markedly, suspiciously devoid of scars. There was not a blemished spot on his body, not a cut or a dent or the darkened remnants of an itch scratched a little too roughly. 

Still he was, and as she always begrudgingly thought, arrestingly beautiful. The disarming kind, the kind that made people turn and look, the kind that had made _her_ , so long ago, turn and look.

“Are you going to take it?” He asked, simpering, taking a step closer.

She did. He clutched her hand.

“What are you doing, Pariston?”

He pulled her flush against him, one hand grabbing hers up, the other coiling around her back. The soap bar fell between their feet.

Cheadle sucked in a breath, stared up at him, felt her breasts against his chest, his penis pressing her stomach, his fingers maundering over her spine. Pariston stared down at her with dark eyes, his hand drifting up to her neck, her soaked hair, the back of her head.

“Everyone here’s in such a fever,” he purled. “Do you feel it, this energy, the energy of hungry prisoners.”

His low voice mingled with the rush of falling water, his hands hot, the skin under them pulsing. He engulfed her.

“Every single one tethered to a string,” he muttered, his lips pink, wet. “Are you the only one in control here?”

Her head hurt. Heavy, she felt it weighing her. This close he was a blur, seemed bigger, more a mass of color than a body. Was she in control?

“Cheadle…” he murmured it, her name lulling over his tongue. “Do you want to fuck me, Cheadle?” His hand crawled back down, fingers tangled with her hair. He smiled at her, caressing the curve of her back. “I’ve always felt that you wished me at the end of a strap-on. To fuck me without letting me touch you. To be honest, I’ve sometimes wished it too. Imagined your hands around my neck, choking me, releasing me,” he whispered. “but you’ve always been too much of a priggish prude for any of that.”

She breathed, swallowed, only felt that of her body which met his.

“I like the chase and you’ve never been much of a catch—you give too much, always present when needed. I’ve always thought you were a little too complacent.” He glided his hand off hers, rolled it up over her spine to her head. “Ging’s always been more entertaining. I used to want him, fiercely. But I guess we’ve always had that in common, didn’t we?” Pariston tilled her hair with his fingers, pressing them over her skull. “Stupid us, we had eyes on such a pernicious man. Are you in control, Cheadle?” He was drawing her closer to the wall. “I saw how you were on the stairs yesterday, when we were alone, how you let me touch you, how your heart pulsed under my hand. I saw how you looked at Ging and I last night. You could kill me now, if you wanted. Push me away, but you don’t.”

Against her better judgement. As a willing accomplice to a deep, buried part of herself.

“If I’m not very much of a catch, why do you care what or how I feel?” She asked, her back touching the cold wall behind her, goosebumps spreading over her arms as his body blocked the water from reaching her, as she felt him growing hard against her. “Why do you hold me like this, Pariston?”

“Because you’ve changed, and because you don’t love like I do.” He said. “You’re a good person. You build and I destroy, but which one of us will put their hands on Ging first, I wonder.”

“You’re pathetic,” Cheadle said, felt the insult at herself, too, at being in this position, at liking it. “Ging is not a possession or an object to claim.”

“But you wish if he were. You’ve wished to break him too, didn’t you?” Pariston said, pensive, rueful. “To dissect him in hopes that he becomes a little bit more comprehensible, to be closer to him.”

“A monster believes everyone around him is a monster as well,” she countered, now seeing him clear with _Gyo_ in her eyes, finally moving, lifting her arm to press the tip of her finger over a little beauty mark she found on his shoulder, then looked up from the little brown spot back to the deep brown of his eyes. “but you’re only a psychopath. You are nothing. People are not like you.”

“You’d know that.” He replied, his mouth stretched softly in something cruel, in something tender. “It’s a tragedy that your brains have been wasted on conformity and order.” He pressed himself tighter against her, pulling down a handful of her hair tightly, exposing her neck to him. “I would have loved to make a mess with you, years ago,” he leaned down over her neck, brushing it with his lips. “but it’s not too late for that, is it?”

The mess of him that she wanted, the mess of them—the mess of coming here alone with him.

He kissed her neck, her cheek leaned against his cold, wet hair, its soft strands sticking to her skin.

“Maybe it’s not.” Cheadle murmured.

Pariston drew his head up with a subtle shift in his countenance. “Ging invited us to his place. An open invitation, of sorts.” He shrugged boyishly. “He said we’ll find it, if we know what we’re looking for.”

**III**


	6. To Step on Their Treasures

"I've read once about babies who were born without sensation and they chewed their fingers and toes off because they couldn't feel any pain at all. I can't sleep when I think about it, it's crazy."

Pariston nodded. “Do you see yourself eating your own fingers and toes?”

The large, beautiful copper spoon disappeared inside Samion’s mouth. “Yeah, I’ll be like a carrot man.”

“A carrot man?”

Sam sputtered a laugh, garbled with the food in his throat. He hunched over in a coughing fit. Pariston handed him a glass of water. Once the boy cleared his throat, he discarded the food plate down on the table next to his bed, recalling some old repulsion.

“But really, there were pictures and all,” Sam continued, looking pointedly at Pariston, lifting up his hands to his face. “The babies just had stubs. Stubs for fingers. No nails no nothing. Just fleshy stubs.”

With his hands so close to his face, Sam seemed to realize that his fingers didn’t look much better than those he saw in the pictures. Moreover, they were worse than the last time he looked at them.

The rash had eaten a good portion of his normal, healthy skin, especially between his fingers, bubbling in those dark crannies like mold, some patches of it drying and flaking and peeling. With the chipped, rotting nails he had, perhaps he was wishing he didn’t have nails at all.

He picked up the plate of food again.

“The doctor said it can’t be treated, my condition, I mean.” Sam said, the plate on his lap. “I won’t eat my toes or fingers though.” The boy resolved to finish his breakfast, refraining from saying more as he worked his way through the bland potato mush still piled in his plate.

The doctor in question was with them in the isolation ward, finally getting a moment to speak with the other ill scientist. Cheadle had performed a couple tests with Sam to ascertain his congenital insensitivity to pain, and it turned out that the kid also suffers from anosmia (which surprised Sam, who and up until that point had comically failed to notice this crucial loss of sensation.) He couldn’t smell anything, but he could taste and distinguish hot from cold, sharp from dull, and he was capable of differentiating various textures from each other. It took the boy a couple days to make amends with the loss of his sense of smell, and then he seemed to bounce back fine, although he picked up this habit of twitching his nose, as if there must be some scent in the air he could still catch.

Cheadle was keeping a close eye on the two of them right now, throwing them glances every other minute to see if everything was going well, to see if the boy was still being cooperative. When their eyes met he nodded to assure her. The white protective suit made her even more distant.

It’s been a week since Gregory’s death, a week since Ging’s appearance, and less since Cheadle met the scientists again to share the latest developments with them. It wasn’t a pretty or easy gathering, to say the least.

Dotti’s magic tree became public knowledge, much to his dismay, despite having previously declared his nonchalance about revealing it. What happened to Gregory and the parasitic fetus inside her was also made known. Many things were divulged, even the strange homogeneity of the child refugees’ gender, except two details that for some reason Cheadle had decided to shelf away: the mysterious water well Gregory spoke of, and the alleged lost journal of Clarence Coll. Hima was aware of one, Dotti of both. Neither said anything during the meeting.

Everybody seemed more aware of the others around them, and Cheadle’s presence had a somewhat toxic effect on their relationships. Those who appeared initially close were growing distant from one another, and those who had amiable associations hardly talked anymore, as if there was more safety in staying apart, and not just within quarantine rules. Cheadle made them work, allocating them tasks that kept them away from one another, and for the first time it seemed like progress was being made.

In the midst of all that, they had no chance of leaving the settlement to see Ging.

The man did not come again after that night, and the last Pariston saw of him was his back as he slid off the bed, adjusted his clothes back on and walked out of the room, presumably to follow Cheadle. “See ya,” were the only words he said before leaving the room, and Pariston had stayed behind, kneeling on the floor just where Ging left him for far longer than he’d admit, thinking with wry humor that Cheadle owed both of them an orgasm.

They did not talk about that night, and neither about what happened between them in the baths, nor about Ging’s invitation. They barely even exchanged any mean pleasantries since the latter incident. Worsened, maybe, by the fact that she let him wash her hair then and she scrubbed his back, which perhaps made her feel even more complicit. Cheadle was all business with him now, and Pariston knew that’s how she protected herself; her best method of keeping him close but away. He was demoted to an apprentice, and there wasn’t a single moment where she let him be free except in sleep.

In the heat of July and the haze of his headaches, Pariston was learning how to administer drugs, how to handle medical tools, how to take and preserve different samples, how to operate respirators, how to care after patients. He helped clean and maintain the isolation ward, the common room, their room, the labs, the repository. Cheadle gave him medical books to read, most on anatomy, but some were on surgeries and surgical methods, and those were the best—and hardest—to read.

He would have made a good surgeon, Pariston believed. No, he would have made an _exceptional_ surgeon, only the field didn’t interest him much, back when the subject of what he wanted to study was laid out on the table. And even if it was a choice—his mother eventually conceded with great sorrow—no medical college would have accepted him with the grades he had.

He possessed no special interests at school, certainly nothing to do with biology, and now that he thought about it, Pariston had entered and graduated school with no particular passions and no academic achievements of note. He had an aptitude for math, but he didn’t need it for the role of elected class representative.

His two older sisters were of the artistic, literary type, so their mother, bless her little heart, wanted something a little more ‘prestigious’ for her only son and last child whose fate she could hope to influence. Thusly he was shipped off to an elite business school at the ripe age of eighteen in a neighboring country—so he could be independent but stay close to the family—where after no more than seven months of studies he dropped out to try his hand at a little thing called the Hunter Exam.

Pariston was, from childhood and up until today, totally and wholly preoccupied with people, and no amount of diversity in the spoiled insecure sharks swarming the campus of his university could hold a candle to the personalities he passed during the exam.

Now, all of the world was momentarily condensed to this sick boy on a deathbed.

“When did you say the pain insensitivity started?” Pariston asked conversationally, rebalancing the clipboard that had slipped a little off his lap.

“I didn’t say.” Sam answered, his plate now emptied. He looked a little better for finishing it.

Pariston tilted his head and smiled. “I get it, you’re smart, and I respect that, but we do need this information to help cure you.”

Sam rolled his eyes. “What does my pain insensitivity got to do with me turning into a zombie?”

“You’re not turning into a zombie,” Pariston said. “If anything, you’re becoming a swampsquatch.”

The boy snorted. “A swamp-what?”

“A swampsquatch.”

“What’s that?”

Pariston hummed uncaringly, didn't give an answer.

“Are you trying to get me to talk?”

“I am, yeah.”

Sam fell back on his pillow, lifting up his arms in frustration. “Look, it happened a long time ago. I ate a weird mushroom or something and apparently it killed my pain nerves or whatever, and now I can’t smell shit.”

“Were you alone when it happened?”

“Of course I wasn’t alone. Come on, Paris, ask me the _real_ questions.”

“Don’t call me that.”

The goofy expression on Sam’s face withered, and the chummy feeling that was animating his hands receded with it too. He stared at Pariston with uncertain eyes, still unsure of the line he crossed and a little hesitant to ask. He clearly wasn’t comfortable with the cold drop in Pariston’s voice or the sudden change in his demeanor. The bit of friendliness he believed they shared drained from the space between them.

“Huh? Why?”

“I would simply prefer that you don’t abbreviate my name.” Pariston said, his voice devoid of warmth. “Can we agree to that?”

The first boundary. It took the boy a moment to nod. “Okay, sure, whatever.”

Pariston smiled. “So, you were saying you weren’t alone?”

“No, I wasn’t. I was with many other people.” Sam answered, newly discomfited by eye contact and preferring to observe the ceiling instead. “It was a group of scientists but not like this one here.”

“Your parents were with them?”

Sam nodded. “They paid us a lot of money to come.”

“Why?”

“A new lifestyle, off the grid kind of thing. There were ads about it, on the internet. I don’t really know, but my parents saw the money offered and agreed.”

“What happened after?”

Sam shrugged. “We came here, but not like _here_ here. It was some other region. We built a church there.”

“A church?”

“Yeah, they were some kinda religion. Talked about god and stuff, preachers there, I mean. They would talk to us every night, talk to everyone there.”

“What did they talk about?”

“I told you, some god they worshipped.” Sam said, finally shifting his gaze back to Pariston. “They said he’s here in the continent and that we should pray to him so he will save us from illness and death. Some of the preachers could perform miracles, too.”

Pariston tilted his head. “What kind of miracles?”

The boy grew a little fidgety, clearly uneasy with the question. “I don’t know, like they could…” he trailed off, scratching his knuckles. Could he feel itches, or was it just a tick? “They could summon things, like ghosts. We couldn’t see them but we felt them and heard them, we really did. They were real.”

Pariston listened intently, watching the boy blinking, trying to recollect his memories or string them into words.

“One of them could take pain away, that’s how I became like this.” Sam finally said, holding his breath, holding something shameful in his chest, indirectly admitting his previous lie. “There was a ceremony and everything, and he chose me. He said I was born ill and he could take away my pain. There was a circle and me in the middle.” He let out a regretful chuckle that he quickly swallowed. There was fear in his eyes. “I thought it would be so cool, if I couldn’t feel pain anymore, thought it would make me really strong, but my dad didn’t like it. Mom was really into it, she pushed me so hard, she volunteered herself too but they wouldn’t take her. Only me. And then,” Sam took a breath, trying to calm himself. “The preacher put a hand on my head, like this, and he took all my pain away. Then to prove it he pierced my tongue with a big needle. I couldn’t feel anything.” Sam stuck out his tongue for a moment, showing him a noticeable but healed puncture in the middle of it. “I thought it was great but I wish I hadn’t done it, I wish I wasn’t chosen, it was all my fault. Everything changed after that, people got weird and started acting weird.”

“And your parents? What did they do?”

“My dad wanted us to leave. Some others like us wanted to run away too and some didn’t. They all fought about it but in whispers,” Sam said, himself whispering, reliving the events of that night. “Dad took me at night even when I told him I didn’t want to. I wanted to stay.”

“But he forced you to leave.”

“I was so loud they heard us and then chased us, so many people, running after us like crazy,” Sam inhaled, his breath shaking. “but others escaped with us and I was like unconscious, like I couldn’t see anything and my dad told me to keep running so I did, but when I finally stopped he wasn’t there and I was just alone with other kids.”

“And you all came here together?”

Sam nodded. “Some man led us here. We couldn’t see his face cause it was very dark and raining so much, but he told us to follow him and we did.”

“Are any of these kids here in the ward?”

Sam nodded again, and he seemed afraid of them, even though they were all half-conscious and younger than him, with beds far away. He was afraid of having been chased to this very spot. His eyes shifted away, and some of the fear morphed into perplexed sadness, into an emotion much older than the kid it saddled.

“They said our lives were not good, I mean the lives we were living before, and that we weren’t good for living them.”

Pariston studied the boy’s face, lost between a prideful frown and the edge of tears.

“Was the life you were living before good, Sam?”

Sam offered a helpless shrug, his voice would fail him if he spoke. His bright eyes were glistening with repressed misery. “I don’t know…” he muttered, pulling absentmindedly at an already dislodged nail. The pain of it was lost to him when he ripped it off.

“Were your parents good people?”

The boy shook his head, but it was neither confirmation nor denial. He shook it because he didn’t know that, either. He didn’t know if they were good people or if his life before coming to the continent was any good, he didn’t know how to measure its goodness, or what to base it on. He just shook his head and cried.

Cheadle shot him a questioning look, hearing the boy’s barely suppressed sobs from her side of the room. Pariston raised his hand reassuringly. This still wasn’t out of control.

This wasn’t the first child he made cry.

“It’s okay, Sam.” He said, patting the boy’s shaking hands with his own gloved, oversized one. The white material of it crinkled awkwardly, not made for physical intimacy of any kind. When the kid made to wipe his tears with the back of his hands, Pariston stopped him. “Don’t touch your eyes.”

“Can I at least lick the snot off my mouth?” Sam inquired resentfully, but with a little, weak laugh.

Pariston didn’t actually know. His eyes turned to Cheadle but she was already approaching them, something like a napkin dangling between her fingers.

She stood at the other side of the bed and handed Sam the napkin. “Use this. It’s clean.”

After a lot of sniffing and coughing and mad inhaling, Sam looked visibly exhausted and weak. His head sunk in the pillow, his face sallow, and when Cheadle checked his temperature she found it higher than it was earlier in the morning.

“At least I can feel the pain in my heart,” he joked, but it was half-hearted. He was too tired to be self-deprecating. It seemed that something new had settled in his little heaving chest, a new-found seriousness. “Is it really untreatable, this pain thing?” He addressed Cheadle with the question as she pulled a chair to sit next to him.

“I’m afraid so,” she answered him, taking the hand he injured a moment ago in hers. “But we can manage it.”

The three fell into a soft quiet as Cheadle wiped the blood on Sam’s finger and cleaned it. Something about the gentleness and consistency of her hand movement lulled the boy into drowsiness, and he just lay there, watching her disinfect his self-inflicted injury with fluttering eyelids.

“Are you going to do to me what you did to that lady behind the curtains,” he asked. “If I become too sick?”

Cheadle looked at the boy for a long moment. “I will do my best so that you don’t reach that point.”

“But what if I do?”

Gently she wrapped his finger with gauze. “If you become too sick, you will decide what you want to do, like she did.”

It was a heavy burden to place on a child, the choice to end their own life, but it seemed to satisfy Sam. “I just don’t want to be alone like she was.”

She smiled at him and kept her hand over his. “You won’t. We will be here, either way.”

For a while, Pariston and Cheadle just sat around the boy’s bed until he fell asleep, his aching chest rising and falling in soft, wheezing breaths. Sunlight seeped through the high windows, warm and golden and checkering the floor with bright rectangles.

The small church of the isolation ward condensed to this corner, a little less desolate in the morning light.

**III**

The sugar here came in big, light brown, boulder-shaped solid blocks that could very well be used as a weapon to knock someone unconscious. 

Pariston had visited the kitchen cellar two days ago in search of sugar, specifically, and been directed towards these gruff beauties. He weighed one in his hand, heavy and light at once, rubbed his fingers against the sticky, granular, jagged surface of the sugar rock, then licked the tips of his fingers, and decided then and there to make jam.

He wasn’t the only one excited for the idea. Those plums were highly edible, and as if in sheer spite at having been barred from them for so long, everybody here went against Dotti’s wishes and declared their desire to try them. When no harm proved real by this, the old man simply conceded with broken pride, wanting to disappear back into his work to preserve the last of his dignity, but Cheadle wouldn’t let him. He had other jobs to do now.

With that, Pariston started with the help of a rotary of cooks who took over the kitchen duty daily. They needed cauldrons, a lot of sugar and fruit, and some time.

And now, he had the first patch in front of him and the chance to taste it.

The deep, viscous blue of the jam made it appear like toothpaste. It glistened beautifully inside the jar, its peculiar, rich color giving it the allure of a magic potion brewed under a starry sky.

“Are you going to try it?” Cheadle asked him, standing beside the kitchen counter where they had laid out all the jars. Hima and Markov were with them in the kitchens, as fascinated by this new produce as two children seeing dessert for the first time. Their eyes wandered over the jars, the enchantment on their faces revealing years of bad diet, of poverty of the soul.

Pariston hummed. “I’m thinking we should eat it with something, but I have doubts about the potato bread.”

“I’m sorry, but there’s really nothing else,” Markov said. “Let’s just try it as it is?”

They opened the jar with spoons ready, their hands hovering, wanton and greedy, over the new food. All four scooped a spoonful of blue, and inspected the mounds under their eyes. The scent of it was overwhelming, like a perfume bottle shattered on the ground. Pariston lifted his spoon in a toast.

“Here’s to mortal joys.”

“To mortal joys!” The others repeated, taking the spoons in their mouths.

The four of them stood in a circle, sharing in this sensation, lying together under this wave that washed over all of them, surrendering, warm and cooped up, silent but for the little festival inside their mouths, something like sleep shrouding them as everything became a serene blur.

Overtaken, Hima leaned against the wall and let out a long sigh. “Dotti that son of a bitch. I can’t believe he’s been hiding this shit from us.”

Markov, on the other hand, stood motionless, the spoon hanging contemplatively from his hand, tears in his eyes.

“It’s not _that_ bad.” Pariston joked, and it seemed to wake the other man from his own quiet, private ecstasy.

“Not at all!” Markov’s eyes widened and he waved his hands. “It’s… it’s…” he was lost for a moment, then he just laughed, deeply and with his whole body, sniffing back the tears. “It’s the closest I’ve felt to home in a very long time.” His grey eyes shifted to the floor in self-consciousness when nobody said anything. “That’s a little stupid to say.”

“It’s not, it’s a huge compliment.” Pariston assured him. “I’m glad you like it.”

“It’s weird, it’s making me feel ignorant." Markov went on. "How we just don’t know anything, not even here, about each other.”

Hima looked away, her face a little less elated, her shoulders sinking down. Without their white coats on, with only their old clothes and without the façade of control, they appeared like two abandoned children. And perhaps that’s what they always were.

Cheadle, during all this, had remained silent, expressing no opinion, her face downcast. Pariston elbowed her shoulder gently, tilting his head down, trying to read her expression. She looked up at him, then at the others. Pushing her glasses back, she smiled at Markov’s concerned face. “It tastes great.”

“Okay, maybe the weed business is illegal and bad optics, so forget about it,” Hima started excitedly, pushing herself off the wall to pick up one of the closed jars and shake it in front of their eyes. “But this isn’t, right? C’mon.”

Markov looked uncomfortable with this shameless, sudden display of entrepreneurial ambition, taking a step away from his colleague as if to distance himself ethically from her. She didn’t need him to voice his disapproval to know it. She squinted at him. “You never sold anything in your life?”

“No,” Markov said. “Although I did make bracelets in school that my friends sold.”

Hima groaned, pointing the spoon still in her hand accusingly. “How did you even end up here?”

He smiled awkwardly, shrinking away from her, his face falling into something boyish and endearing as he tried to fend her playful belligerence off him.

How _did_ Markov end up here, Pariston wondered. It’s not that the man was just outwardly peaceful or harmless, but that he had the kind of personality usually screwed over in life—simultaneously flighty and trusting, he was the type to linger, obscure and submissive, in prison, and he not only survived that, but survived it long enough and well enough to be brought here, to the most dangerous place on the planet, chosen by Cheadle specifically.

Out of respect for them or mistrust of him, she had not divulged these people’s pasts to Pariston, neither did she confront them by it, and they were warming up to her, at least these two who stood with them now, the two she drew closest, one of them trying to convince her of their business idea, the other suppressing laughs.

They liked her, he could tell. They wanted her to like them, too.

And that was the thing about Cheadle. The way she could instill lifelong trust and loyalty in people, even if they weren’t fond of her personally, and whenever she earned that she earned it the hard way. The rewards of earning her trust and loyalty, too, were endless, but they weren’t easy to have.

Ging had that about him, as well, in his own way and through his own methods, except he didn’t _seek_ to earn it, like she did, didn’t care either way, and was far less dependent on it.

As for himself, Pariston couldn’t pride himself on this particular quality. Nobody trusted him long enough to live, and even his own family and classmates and teachers, back in the day, treated him with a specific kind of propitiating caution that bespoke fear and consternation. People liked Pariston and stuck by him for different reasons, none of which had to do with his willingness to catch them if—and when—they came crashing down. He was a generous showman and entertainer, and that was enough to draw people close.

He smiled and accepted the two scientists’ thanks, and then watched them leave with a plan to distribute the jam; left alone, at the end, with Cheadle in the kitchen. He bumped her again with his arm.

“Did you like what I made?” He asked. “You didn’t look at me when you said it’s great.”

She looked at him, her expression neutral. “It was great.”

“I want to give Twen some of this, personally.” Pariston said, turning to the rows of blue jars on the counter. “And I’d like to do it by myself.”

“Why, for the car?”

Pariston smiled. “Do you want me to ask him for the car?”

“You’re going to ask him either way.”

Deciding not to open the subject of the invitation with her, neither to poke the matter of her willingness to let him out of her sight, he instead searched the kitchen for a clean napkin in which to wrap his little gift. “I think we should keep one for Ging, too. I’d love for him to try it.”

Cheadle smirked. “You’ve been so generous, lately.”

“I’m always generous, when I have the means.” He said, finding a fittingly red piece of cloth for his jar. "You know that."

She watched him try how the jar looked with the cloth he found, testing different shapes in which to tie it, styling it carefully and patiently. The bright, blood red of the cloth made a striking color scheme with the dusky, luminescent blue of the jam. In a way, wrapping it made it seem even more like poison. Perhaps those were Pariston’s aesthetic intentions.

“What will you be doing?” He asked her, already readying himself to leave.

“I have a couple people I need to see, too.” Cheadle said. “Come back to the third lab, when you’re done.”

Pariston nodded. “If you see professor Dotti, don’t give him a jar.” He said. “I will do it later, myself. As an honest apology.”

“Fine, suit yourself.”

Since what felt like a lifetime, the two parted ways.

Without him by her side, trailing behind her or strolling in front of her, Cheadle walked differently. There was a weight to him, to his presence, a weight to every minute she spent stuck with him. Maybe it was a bad decision to let him go see Twen by himself, but for a moment she didn’t care. She wanted to be rid of him, to be by herself, to spend as much time as she could without anyone around her.

The jam was magnificent, and nothing like she’d ever tasted before, including other jams, but that’s precisely what put her off. Blue, and a blue like that, was rare to find in nature, rarer still in food, and Dotti’s pretty plums were of such a shade that—and even after testing and eating them—still seemed unreal to her. Markov was onto something when he likened the taste to home; there was something primordial about the fruits, about the tree. A chimera that was futuristic yet ancient, a primeval organism pulled together with—by—new materials, and Cheadle could not escape the sense that she had seen it before.

In her aimless wandering she chose the hallways that seemed least frequented. The kitchens were on the third floor and she wished they were higher so that she wouldn’t reach the ground floor so quickly. With slow steps Cheadle descended the stairs, dreading an unwanted encounter with someone or the other. How could such a large place feel so crammed?

Erja Pyrr, the other infected scientist who was still alive and with whom she talked this morning, was surprisingly high-spirited and optimistic. The necrotic rash he suffered was highly localized, unlike the others, and it had consumed most of his left calf and all of his left eyeball so that the latter appeared as if his eye socket was stuffed with dead algae, fuzzy white with a protruding iris that seemed about to slough off the eyeball. It was blind, and he was unable to close his eyelids or blink. It bestowed him with a strange, roguish visage that was hampered by the other eye—a rapidly-blinking, merciful blue that sought her eagerly and didn’t waver, even when the man discussed with her his own ideas of debridement and amputation.

Cheadle told him that she, too, had considered debridement as a surgical option to remove the dead and dying tissue, but that she realized its futility once she discovered that the necrosis was not starting within the integumentary system but much deeper. Moreover, the infection was destroying intercellular bridges and forming what she called ‘cell ghettos’, groups of cells pulled apart and insulated within clusters, making it difficult for them to communicate and therefore relay the presence of foreign material.

The cells which existed to protect and defend his body were functioning to make him into something else, too, and this thing, whatever it was, preferred fragile, sloughed, rotting skin tissue. She didn’t confirm a link between the parasitic fetus and the virus, however, because she still couldn’t draw a convincing causal relation between the two. One case was an anomaly, after all, and Erja Pyrr had nothing growing in any of his cavities, ascertained after a thorough nen examination. None of the other patients had, either, all of them little boys, two whose condition has significantly, and perhaps irreversibly, worsened.

Despite this, the ill scientist remained in good spirits, and urged her to relay to him all new developments and discoveries. She promised to do that, a half-promise, it was, and it made her feel bad, and she was glad that she could be alone and feel bad about everything she wanted to feel bad about without Pariston towering over her to read it on her face.

And yet, when she found a quiet corner on a small staircase to do just that—at the exact floor where she had talked with Ging a week ago; the second time she reached this floor in a thickheaded haze—her mind seemed to suddenly and utterly forget it all.

Instead, Cheadle had an epiphany.

**III**

The higher Pariston walked the narrower the stairs became.

Two feet did not fit on a single ledge, not even all of one. He climbed up on tiptoes, his right shoulder pressed against the wall, his right side open to a deep abyss with no balusters which could intercept a potential fall. He felt like he was walking on air, held by nothing, protected by nothing. He just ascended, closer to the light, closer to the sun that he knew had to be immersing everything on the roof.

Pariston had been observing Twen whenever possible, trying to draw a mental schedule of the man’s routine. He hung out with the ex-soldier goons and they seemed to be his primary, and only, social group, but he was most often apart from them, and eventually he learned that Twen spent most of his time in either of two places and was rarely seen anywhere else, even during food distributing hours.

One was a junkyard seaward within the settlement borders where he built little stuff and tinkered with various equipment. The other was this.

Dotti Steis wasn’t the only one with a secret garden.

He stood in the doorway, taking in the scene stretched in front of him. The afternoon sun shone white over everything, and it took a moment for Pariston’s eyes to adjust. A field of spikey, dark, lush green peppered with yellow and purple blossoms spread before him, with tight pathways between each cluster of plants, themselves overgrown with other, lesser, species, and a man crouched in the center of it all, watering something, his thin blond hair so light and faded it appeared like the fur of a polar bear, hollow and transparent.

Twen stood up to his full height—and he was a very tall, very thin man—to observe the new comer. When he saw it was Pariston, he looked surprised. Perhaps he was expecting someone else, but he snickered.

“So you found me.”

“You’re not very hard to find, I’m afraid.” Pariston said, leaving the doorway to enter this base of operations, not awaiting an invitation or permission.

Despite the sun beating down on them, the greenery here cooled the air quite nicely, and a lovely breeze swayed the plants around him so that they chafed and rustled. They had a strong, intoxicating odor.

“A lovely garden you have here.”

The man scoffed. “If you want weed just say.”

“Weed? Not at all. I came to give you something,” Pariston approached the man leisurely, watching that metallic blue gaze seizing him from head to toe, and what Pariston had read back in the car as pure hostility was now tempered by something else; a little hesitation, more caution, and perhaps, a grain of respect. He was clearly one to learn a lesson quickly. Pariston offered the wrapped jar. “It’s food.”

Twen glanced at the offering then back to him. His hands remained at his sides. “That jam, ain’t it?”

“Oh, so you’ve heard about it.”

“I’ve heard about a lot of things.”

“Well, I made it myself.” Pariston said with a smile.

“And you just wanna give it to me?”

Pariston hummed, stepping closer. “Is that weird?”

Twen studied him warily, a soft frown adorning his face, and from this short distance Pariston could see old pockmarks and pecks covering the man’s ashy face; big, asymmetrical lips; a long nose and a prominent chin scar. He wore an old, dirty white tank top, revealing lean, strong arms and a dark farmer’s tan. He was barefoot, too, with a pair of faded, tattered jeans rolled up over naturally hairless calves. His toes were dirty, and ugly.

The long, reciprocated scrutiny apparently made him uncomfortable, and he half-turned, wiping his soiled hands with his tank top. “Did your little boss send you?”

“No, I wanted to see you by myself. She doesn’t know I’m here.” Pariston lied, once again drawing attention to the jar in his hands. “I’d love for you to take it. I wrapped it just for you.”

Twen snorted, but took the jar regardless. He unwrapped it and was struck for a moment by the starry blue within. “This looks like fucking poison. What, revenge for what happened to you at the baths?”

“Oh no, I don’t care about that at all.” Pariston said, bypassing Twen to wander around this roof garden, plants brushing against his ankles. “Although it _was_ very rude, what you’ve done.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

Pariston found an old wicker chair and dragged it close to the edge of the roof. He allowed himself to sit on it. “But isn’t passivity, in itself, a form of action?” He said, turning his face from the fields below them to the man approaching the edge to stand beside him. “You were a spectator. That’s a choice.”

Those blue eyes were as faded as the man they belonged to. A cruel, demeaning smirk darkened them. “Why care when you have a woman to defend you?”

Pariston laughed, enjoying the cold gust of wind that whipped his hair back, the bright sun on his face. “I see you haven’t forgotten to pick up the shred of ego wrenched from you that day.”

Twen didn’t like that, and he didn’t know what to say to it. He was so close to Pariston’s chair that he could just tip it over gently, effortlessly, sending Pariston headfirst over the roof and into the ground below. But he wasn’t going to do it.

Silence hung over them, sweet and warm, and Pariston took the time to stake out the horizon with his gaze. From this height, the land stretched all the way to the sky, green and dark and incomprehensible, but somewhere in the distance to the west he noted a slightly dissonant material, a peculiarity jammed up among ancient, mammoth trees that appeared like them but not of them, poking the sky with its broken hull.

He wouldn’t have seen it if he wasn’t already looking for it.

“It’s nen. I know what it is. I know what she used.” Twen said, a confident naivety pervading his hoarse voice.

Pariston smiled at him. “Smart boy.”

“Don’t fucking speak with me like this.” Twen spat out, the plants around him giving his eyes a faint green shade. “You’re the lowly assistant cleaning bathrooms. You think I don’t fucking know who you really are, Pariston Hill?”

“You do?”

“Twen?”

Both of them turned towards the doorway where a tall, dark man stood, wearing casual attire more well-kept than what the others cared to wear. He had a hand over his eyes to block the sun, and he seemed hesitant to enter.

“I fixed your stupid shaving machine but couldn’t find you, so I gave it to your wife this morning.” Twen said out loud, encumbered by this sudden appearance.

The man at the doorway laughed. “Thank you, but I’m here for the usual. I can come by later, if it’s inconvenient now.” He seemed to be checking Pariston and how dangerously close he was to the edge of the roof. “Aren’t you afraid there, Pariston?”

Pariston already had the pleasure of meeting Dal Ormana, at the last gathering, realizing that he had of course seen the man before but didn’t recall the name he gave, which was absolutely a shame. If anybody in this settlement was a viable bachelor this man would have been him, with the unkempt beard and all. If he asked Pariston with that even, deep voice of his to pull his chair back Pariston would do it instantly.

“Don’t worry about me Dal, it’s lovely here.” Pariston called back. “Please, come join us. Twen was telling me about the curing process.”

“Oh yeah?” Dal walked closer, coming into full view. “Didn’t take you for a smoker.”

“I’m not!” Pariston chuckled, glancing at an irked Twen. “But I think I might be interested in trying.”

Dal found another chair and picked it up, choosing to put it down a little back, admitting with an unashamed smile that heights intimidated him.

He was an undeniably, objectively handsome man, his black skin glistening under the sunlight, his eyes dark and attentive. Pariston had never seen anyone before whose eye color so seamlessly matched their skin so that they appeared like an extension of it. He seemed much more stable and put-together than everyone else; had an easy-going personality, a brotherly, patient levity about him, and for a man who was robbed of his fatherhood the moment it happened, he didn’t look it. Pariston wondered what a man like this found in someone like Nina; they were so unlike each other, and it followed, curiously, that he never saw them together.

“Got us a new blend, Twen?” Dal asked, leaning forward with elbows on his knees.

“I said you get me the shit and I make it, Ormana.” Twen said, squatting down halfway between the two of them. “And you didn’t get me the shit, did you.”

Dal laughed, opening his arms as if to show Twen that he had nothing on him this time, either. “Ever since we were told about his secret tree, Dotti’s been testy with me, and now I have to think twice before visiting his garden.” He shook his head, woeful but not grudging. “I’ve been building a rapport with the man, respecting his boundaries, not prying, and then bam! Now I have to convince him I’m one of the good ones again.”

“Blame that doctor,” Twen said, a resentful little boy, busying his fingers with the fraying threads of his jeans. “She snitched on him.”

“Snitching is too strong of a word, if you ask me. I think what doctor Cheadle did was the right thing, ultimately.” Dal confessed, his mouth pursed in thought. “Dotti is a stubborn silly mule, but he has no choice but to come around. I’ll give him a week or two to adjust.” Then he turned his pretty dark eyes to Pariston. “What do you think of it all, Pariston?”

Pariston hummed. “He was hiding a valuable and potentially revolutionary resource. I’m sure once he tries the jam we made from his plums he’ll be a little less upset.”

“Oh, I’ve heard about the work you’ve been doing in the kitchen!” Dal exclaimed. “When can we try it?”

“Right now, sir,” Pariston smiled, gesturing with an open palm to the jar Twen had carelessly left on the ground over its red wrapping. “I’ve brought Twen a sample from our first patch. Let’s just say he and I started out on the wrong foot, and I wanted to amend that, but you can take this jar if you want, I’ll get him another one.”

Dal scooted off his chair to bend down and pick it up. “I’ll wait for my own jar, thank you, but don’t mind if I try it now, eh, Twen?”

“Whatever.”

“A yes it is, then.” Dal opened the jar and drew it closer to his nose, taking a hearty whiff. “Heavenly, and the color, too,” he tilted his head, inspecting the insides of the container. “Reminds me of some of that old fungi I’ve tried to culture last summer.”

He dipped his finger gingerly in the jar, and brought it to his lips.

Pariston felt a tingle climb up his spine and spread over his shoulders, his eyes fixated on the speck of glistening blue left, unfelt, on the man’s mouth.

Dal leaned back in his chair, eyes closed, breathing deeply, awash in warm contentment, his tongue moving inside his mouth to gather every last bit of taste. “Damn Pariston, Dotti better fall at your feet when he tries this.” He closed the jar and put it back where it was. “I’m really tempted to steal it, but I’m a patient man, so I’ll just go to the kitchen and take one.”

“Be my guest!” Pariston said, loving the way his name sounded in the other man’s mouth. “I’ll make more soon, so help yourself to as much as you want. Make sure to take one for Nina, too.”

That last sentence didn’t have the desired effect on Dal, who only nodded and smiled enthusiastically, getting off the chair with a long sigh, ready to leave. “I’ve gotta go now.”

Twen stood up, too, and pulled what appeared to be two joints from his pocket. “I can only give you these for now, better ones I promised to others so you’ll have to make do.”

Dal took them with resigned acceptance. “Beggars can’t be choosers.” He said, tucking them in the pocket of his dress shirt. “Guess I’ll have to wait until I find my way back into Dotti’s good graces.”

“I can get you what you want from his garden.” Pariston interjected, standing up as well. “As doctor Cheadle’s assistant I still go there regularly. He can’t turn me away from his door.” He told them with a confident smile. “Just tell me what you need and I’ll do my best to bring it for you.”

The two of them regarded him incredulously for a moment, then shot each other brief glances.

Dal was already half-way down the stairs when he listed the last ingredient they wanted. Pariston nodded at him and waved goodbye, then turned back to Twen. The tall man stood at the edge of the roof, among his plants, his wiry figure lonesome against the setting sun, so large and so close behind him, dyeing his stringy hair a fiery orange.

When he spoke, his voice was despondent and weary. “Would your boss approve of this?”

Pariston walked slowly towards him, reveling in the tender, warm light that washed over everything, in the orange hues that made Twen’s face a little less hard and cold, a little more approachable. He came to a stop right in front of the other man, shorter than him, in his shade. “What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her.”

Twen let out a mirthless chuckle. “But really, what do you want?”

“I wanted to ask you about the state of the vehicles,” he said. “We might have to leave the settlement soon, the doctor and I. We will need one.”

“I can prepare one of the cars for you, but you’ll have to get me the plants first.”

Pariston smiled. “Of course, I was going to offer the same deal.”

It was him, now, who could push Twen off the roof. He could put a gentle hand to the man’s chest, step closer, and that would be it. Twen would try and hold onto his arm, grabble for the straw outstretched to him, but it would be futile.

In the future, when the warmth of summer is replaced by the unforgiving winter of this land, Pariston—and he was yet to know it—will do just that.

But for now, he sat back on the chair and enjoyed the view, gazing out, untroubled, at the house hidden far among the trees.

**III**

Cheadle ran.

She zipped past hallways and back to the upper floors, skipping a couple people on her way, dashing towards her room having decided to forgo her intended visit to the isolation ward.

_All boys… twin of its sisters… Dotti’s tree… The fetus… water well…_

Her thoughts preceded her, racing her legs, faster than her, faster than she could gather them in a single, coherent sentence or a logical explanation. All she knew was that she needed to peruse a very specific paper that she had not looked at closely before, a paper that was within professor Clarence’s files, one of the papers she took from the repository.

The room was so far away, _so_ far away, she didn’t want to lose her directions but she couldn’t see clearly, already looking at the file she left on the dresser before she even laid eyes on it.

“Doctor, are you okay?”

Nina’s face appeared at the periphery of her vision, surprised or concerned or curious and none of it mattered, Cheadle didn’t stop. “I’m fine!”

Finally in the dingy hallway where their room was, Cheadle yet again made to open the wrong door, groaned loudly at this consistent gap in her brain circuit, then turned around to open the door to their room.

There they were, the files. Exactly where she had left them this morning, still exactly with everything that frustrated her about them. Incompletion, amateurishness, bizarre lapses of thought and logic, disembodied conclusions to ideas not even written, and parts that were clearly missing. They were gibberish, to her, but one specific portion that she had glanced over quickly back at the repository flashed brightly in her mind.

A small, patchy, almost inconsequential mention of a fungi culturing experiment.

There were no specific details, no dates, no cataloguing of methods for carrying out the experiment nor the conditions under which it was carried, neither was there any mention of the goal of this experiment. But there was something.

Among the disjointed sentences and prosaic wanderings, there was a name. _c._ _shiols_.

She had overlooked this initially because she didn’t think it mattered, because it seemed like a draft, because it wasn’t what she wanted to read, but it seemed to her now like the biggest clue in the world.

Shiols were an indigenous, parasitic species of fungi that colonized estuaries and usually depleted the very water resource that supported their expansion, sprouting deep, sturdy, highly complex net roots which split and branch indefinitely under water, feeding on marine animals and organisms, from the smallest plankton to the largest fish, catching anything and everything that was unlucky enough to fall in their clutches. The biggest ship wouldn’t be able to pass that organic dam.

They rely on water streams to carry their spores for reproduction and were, most interestingly, unable to reproduce asexually by themselves or sexually with members of their own species, instead forming a stunningly versatile but obligatory symbiosis with individuals of various other species, both male and female, to reproduce for them. Those males had many ‘types’ but none were sequential or simultaneous hermaphrodites, as first theorized, nor were they forming dioecious colonies that separated the gonochoric males from the females. The shiols were completely, wholly unisexual.

They were also enchantingly, brilliantly blue.

There were connections she sensed were peculiar and important, links that led to various mysteries, details she was yet to study thoroughly and put in order, and what worried her was that the settlement neither contained nor presented a viable habitat for the fungi. Cheadle had looked into the water resources in the settlement and found nothing of note, only the usual harmless bacteria. She had gone with Dotti to the underground water treatment facility, took samples from every faucet and puddle around her, and still she found nothing extraordinary.

As to the contents of Clarence’s strange little experiment with them, she had very little to go on because these papers provided her with nothing and contained more questions than answers. She needed to find the rest of this, to find the journal, to put her hands on the scraps of notes that strangely did not find their way to the repository. She needed to speak more with the others about what the late professor was up to during the last months of his life. More and more, he seemed to her like an elusive, shifty figure, milling about the edges of everything she touched here, close with everybody but not close enough, shaped anew over and over again on the lips of those who talked of him.

What Cheadle needed most now, however, were live members of the fungi species, and as far as she could tell, there were none in the settlement, nothing in the samples library or the labs, and no clues to any experiment leftovers in these papers she clutched in her hands.

What she needed now was a guide she could trust. A tracker with excellent senses who knew the land and could take her where she wanted to go.

She needed Ging.

Maybe it was time to accept that stupid invitation.

**III**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A bit of paratext:
> 
> 1) Sam reading about and being lowkey traumatized by the babies suffering from congenital insensitivity to pain who eat their skin and flesh is straight out of my experience stumbling on said article when I was around 9 years old or so. Naturally I have filled this fic with the oldest, most primal of my fears.
> 
> 2) I struggled the most with coming up with a name for Twen. I saw him vividly in my mind but just couldn't land on a name I felt fit him. Then one day, there's me reading an article about Mark Twain, and I thought: "Holy shit, Twain! Twain's a good name for that dingus." Then not a minute later it dawned on me. He didn't sound like a Twain, he sounded like a Twen. 
> 
> The rest is, obviously, history.


	7. And You Know Where All the Lonely Men Go

Rain poured down in ropes and threads, hammering over the roof of the car, cascading down the sides, over the windows, to the mud below, around the struggling wheels, turning in the sludge of earth, of thick soil and thicker foliage. Mouth dry and head pounding, Pariston opened his window and stretched his arm out to the rain, catching the warm torrent in the palm of his hand. The soft fabric of his shirt stuck to his arm and back. He unbuttoned his collar.

The world outside was so green and foggy and wet.

A faint rosy hue adorned Cheadle’s cheeks, the sweat of her sternum printed on her shirt, lips dry. She ran her tongue over them, again and again. Hair stuck to the sides of her face, she pushed it away.

It’s been three days since they left the settlement.

As promised, Pariston had delivered the coveted plants from Dotti’s garden to Twen. He exchanged them with the old scientist for a jar of blue jam and an apology—and he tried to make it as sincere as possible, and worked particularly on the cadence of his remorse. Dotti accepted both, yet held onto the right to remain suspicious and unwelcoming, but that was none of Pariston’s business.

And as promised, Twen began fixing and preparing the car. He had accepted the plants with a kind of begrudging gratitude and childish petulance. His rushed, hushed ‘thanks’ was a delight to Pariston’s ears.

Somehow, during the past days, as he and Cheadle prepared to leave the settlement, he had managed to sustain a budding, mutually beneficial ‘friendship’ not only with Twen, but with Dal, too.

It was an exclusive, covert, unofficial boy club, and although Pariston wouldn’t go as far as to claim he started it—even though he did—he nonetheless enjoyed the right to call himself a distinguished member, not because he was particularly important but because he was the outsider slowly worming his way in. The two men had obviously been desiring something of this sort, the casual company of other guys—not other soldiers, for Twen, and not other scientists, for Dal. They wanted to hang out and talk shit, and Pariston caught on to that. The two enjoyed it more because they thought Cheadle was unaware of their little nightly meetups, where they gathered on the roof to smoke and chat. To them, Pariston was onto this shared, boyish resistance. And he was, to an extent. He liked it. That wasn’t an act. Twen and Dal were still full of secrets, and they still talked, even with each other, behind a hundred veils, and Pariston was perfectly fine with that. Moreover, he loved the guessing game.

Markov was, interestingly, on the fringes of this club. The short, tousled man, with his erratic gaze and nervous smile appeared little interested in spending time with them. He was distant, and not only because Cheadle kept him busy. Pariston had seen him several times with Twen, although Markov seemed to dislike the latter’s company in the presence of others, and Pariston could understand that—Whenever alone, Twen had a different flavor; a less aggressive, less combative attitude, a periphery gentleness, even, the kind often performed out of sight. When his crew of pulpy half-wits wasn’t around, Twen was less inclined to buff his chest and play predator, less inclined to draw out his claws and bare his fangs. Markov sought that, and when it wasn’t available he simply retreated.

The other soldiers didn’t like that Twen was close with the scientists, and lately they didn’t like that he was ‘collaborating’ with the new arrivals, especially after the bath incident.

To them, Twen was accepting subjugation. That could very well be it, but Pariston didn’t care. Those soldiers couldn’t even glance at him or Cheadle anymore without looking away nervously, and that only made them more hostile. But to Pariston, Twen only wanted to survive, and in order to survive one has to align themselves with the powerful, and after the little harassment debacle, it seemed Twen recognized who held more power in the settlement, suddenly embarrassed by the posse to which he previously proudly belonged. It took him some time to accept it, begrudgingly, and now even when he spoke of Cheadle he did so with less outward antagonism and more caution.

Pariston didn’t care either way. He felt strangely safe and content, secure where he stood and excited about what’s ahead.

Before leaving, under a fledgling metal awning in Twen’s junkyard, Pariston stood, enjoying the mild chill of the morning rain. Inside, Twen was affixing a newly-cleaned, high-powered solar panel to the car, fingers blackened with grease, perspiration glistening on his forehead, the large scar on his chin more prominent now that his face was tinted with the pink of concentrated labor. It was hot inside the shed, and thin streams of sweat gathered at the man’s elbows in little drops, falling to his jeans. He sighed, wiped his forehead, fought against glancing at the entrance, gave himself to the small parts of his work.

Pariston was openly and unceremoniously disallowed entrance to the shed. It’s one thing to have found the roof weed garden and hang out there, another to enter this other private domain. Twen can’t lock the stairs to the roof but he can lock this shed, and he made it clear that nobody was welcome here, the one thing that truly belonged to him in any sense of the word, so Pariston had no choice but to stand outside and watch.

Everybody in the settlement knew where they were going. Cheadle had been transparent about it, and Pariston knew that he hadn’t really overestimated her ability to maintain peace. Relations had softened and everyone talked with a little more trust and faith. Cheadle said that Ging Freecs could help, and that she needed to scout the geographical range around the settlement to collect vital data that will help in learning more about the virus. Her theory was strange and strangely plausible, but there was yet to be any concrete evidence and for that she reserved the right to elaborate further.

The two of them have been exchanging all sorts of information, except for one single thing that Pariston decided to withhold from her. It felt more exciting to keep it a secret. For now.

When she gathered the scientists once again and showed them the scraps of paper containing that fungus experiment, Dal—whom he expected to say something—said nothing, his face remaining amiably impassive. Only Sulei said she knew about the experiment. It was possible that it wasn’t the same experiment of ‘last summer’ which Dal mentioned so flippantly on the roof, and it was possible that the papers don’t really belong to Clarence Coll, and possible, too, that the whole file was simply red herring. Cheadle already considered the latter two but knew nothing about the first possibility, because he hadn’t told her about what he’d heard and the dots he subsequently connected.

Pariston wanted her trust because he wanted his nen and equal footing, but he also wanted the trust of Dal. For what, exactly, he still didn’t know. Things like these usually revealed themselves later.

It will be fun to see this one thread unravel.

After days’ hassle of preparation and planning and discussing arrangements, both of them were now, on their journey towards Ging, feverishly silent. The world outside the car’s windows prompted a kind of serene reverence, a kind of quiet contemplation. They still weren’t very far from the settlement, still somewhat close to a modicum of civilization, still driving on land previously trekked. There were clear footpaths and roads among trees, subtle signs that spoke of human visitation, but the farther inside the forests they ventured the clearer it became why people feared leaving the settlement, why so many flocked to it while others disappeared inside the entrails of this land.

The forests here devour pride, and devour the solitary, and everywhere he glanced a disease could be lurking, maybe the very disease which invaded the settlement. In his breast pocket, Pariston felt for the three joints Twen had given him. He didn’t even have to tilt his head down or pull one out to smell it. He could tell it was powerful. Twen initially wanted to give him only one but Pariston asked for two more, and two more weren’t free.

“Want one?” He asked Cheadle, his voice sounding louder at the sudden stop of rainfall.

“I assumed you were keeping them for later.”

“We can always pass one between the three of us.”

She glanced at him from the corner of her eye. “Where do you hope it will lead you, this ‘friendship’ with Twen?”

Pariston shrugged. “Somewhere interesting.”

"He doesn’t like us very much.”

“But he will.” He said, watching as her attention shifted from him to something outside. She brought the car to a careful if sudden stop. “What is it?”

But Cheadle was already walking out of the car and into a nearby dark groove where a swarm of yellow flies was hovering. Pariston followed suit, but remained at the door on the other side. She squatted down, pulling her shirt over her mouth and nose, her body obscuring whatever lay at her feet. Her sudden intrusion into this funnel caused the flies to scatter about, spreading a very particular stench.

It was a dead animal.

She jogged back to the car, opened the trunk and hauled up her huge backpack. Gloves, vials, special ziplock bags, syringes, blades.

“Is it safe to deal with a corpse like that?”

“No,” she said, pulling down her collar to wear an actual mask. Gloved and masked but still largely exposed, she returned to that dark spot with brisk steps. “Close the window.”

“Need any help?”

“No. Get in the car, and don’t move.”

Pariston rolled the window up, stayed outside.

She must’ve cut the animal open. A heavy, overbearing, sour odor filled the air. The hoard of yellow flies buzzed frantically, seemingly multiplying in their frenzy, their big abdomens round and spotted, wings gray and large; robbed momentarily of their prey, they drilled the air around the car, more clearly noticeable against the vehicle’s black surface, appearing everywhere Pariston looked. They were nasty and aggressive, they hovered dangerously around Cheadle’s body, and if not for the spilled blood of an already claimed meal they would have attacked the two of them. He didn’t move a finger.

The spotted yellow fly was a somewhat familiar sight. An indigenous, abundant species that could be found everywhere on the continent, and fed on everything from decaying wood and rotting flesh to live, breathing intruders. Seeing them around was a good sign, and their absence—along with the absence of all other animals and critters—around the settlement was remarkable.

One fly beat its wings close to his head, one zipped by his face, many settled on the car, rubbing their smelly limbs together. Every single one of them could bite. The females especially were aggressive and constantly hungry. “Cheadle?”

“A minute.”

These insects could be disease carriers. They could be reservoir hosts. Their bites were painful and long-lasting, under the best of circumstances.

“They took over the car.” He called out again. One landed on his hand. It crawled between his thumb and forefinger.

“I’m almost done!”

He could feel one in the strands of his hair.

When she finally stood up, a hundred flies revved their wings around her, flying madly about, in a collective craze, the wave that started with the ones around her ebbing all the way to the flies on the car. Together, they sounded like a flaming engine ready to explode.

To avoid aggravating them any further, Cheadle made her way back to the car slowly, her bloody samples in one hand, the other holding a vial containing some captured flies. Now that competition retreated, the flies calmed down, scattering around them, flying back to their meal. Pariston got back inside.

With a long sigh, Cheadle entered the car through the backseat. That’s where they kept a package for Ging along with their bags, and a freezer tank he suspected was a nen construct. Something like intestines was in that bag she put there. Her gloves were bloodied. Carefully she took them off along with the mask and put them in a tightly zipped bag.

“What was it?” He asked, watching her pull herself back to the driver seat.

“A vole of some kind. It was mangled so I couldn’t tell for sure.” She said, turning her arm and pulling up her sleeve to reveal a couple bites around the inside of her elbow.

Pariston cupped her elbow and brought her arm closer to inspect the bites. “You’re hurt.”

“Yeah, they were more aggressive than I remember.” She said, her arm uncomfortably, awkwardly unfurled under Pariston’s eyes. “We should get going.”

“Wasn’t there a balm for it?”

“There is, but I don’t have it.” Cheadle said, taking back her arm from his grip, restarting the engine. The heat of the bites began spreading. “It’s not dangerous, I’ve been bitten by them before.”

“Let’s switch places, I’ll drive.”

She glared at him. “I’m not incapacitated.”

“They’re going to get worse,” Pariston reminded her. “Maybe Ging will have something for them.”

Cheadle let out a frustrated sigh. “Let’s get there first and then we’ll see.”

At first, when he told her about the ship in the forest, the one he saw from the roof if he focused hard enough in the right direction, she wasn’t entirely convinced. Ging must live close enough to the settlement if he could come and go frequently, she gave him that, and had agreed that a ship permanently dry-docked so deep inside land and this far from the shore could, reasonably, appeal enough for Ging to inhabit, but there were no confirmations he was there and getting lost inside the endless forests of the Dark Continent in futile pursuit of Pariston’s hunch was the last thing she wanted, yet she continued driving, suspecting that at some point they might have to give up the car. The deeper inside the forest they ventured the harder it was to drive, and despite exposure to predators and the elements, she believed it was safer, faster, and much less conspicuous to move on foot.

Cheadle hadn’t been in the field for a long time, and regardless of all dangers outside the walls of the settlement, and despite her uncertainty about Pariston’s directions and the vague map he drew her, she was excited. Observing fauna and flora, gathering samples, compiling as much data as possible, tracing a pathogen’s journey through its carriers to its hosts, trying to discern its life cycle, it was rigorous work and essential to her job, and she loved every bit of it. Staying in the settlement was never going to be enough, and relying on the information the residents there gave her won’t matter if she ultimately failed to follow the pathogen right where it starts.

It was dawn when they set out, the sky still a deep indigo, blooming amid cold drizzle. Sulei had accompanied them outside to see them off, and so did Hima, Markov, and Twen. Sulei asked why just the two of them, why not take a whole team, and there was a kind of shaky hope in her eyes, her flaxen hair catching faint light, and the expressions on the others’ faces suggested an expectation of that sort, but Cheadle said three were enough, and she believed that, all circumstances considered. Bringing other scientists along would only hinder them. No need to expend precious resources. Three Hunters—no, two—were enough for now. Besides, she needed them here. Markov was close to finishing the refugees’ profiles and studying the samples, while Hima has succeeded in keeping the parasitic fetus alive and well, and Sulei promised—in her own way and with cryptic words—to seek the lost journal and missing papers of Clarence Coll.

It was growing hotter as the hour approached afternoon, the car sputtering and jittering on marshy terrain, the sky above blocked by towering trees and sprawling branches. Surrounded by glistening green, clothes stuck to their bodies, the deeper they drove the less faith she had in this vehicle’s capabilities.

The rain which had stopped for an hour returned once again, first a sprinkle then a downpour, drowning out the already meager sounds of hiding wildlife. Her arm stung and she felt it growing heavy, the skin around the bites swelling and reddening. It itched and pulsed. Another hour and it will become numb. A couple hours later it will fill with puss and blood and she’ll have to drain it. That was the good scenario. The bad scenario would be that the spotted yellow fly has become a reservoir host or carrier either of the infectious agent she was hunting or of some other unknown pathogen.

Nevertheless, it was somewhat reassuring to see animals and insects through the road; birds hopping away from rain, taking shelter in their nests among branches and leaves; hives, burrows, trunk cavities. Still, she couldn’t stop the car and lure one of these creatures every time she saw one. The only reason she had stopped for that vole was the fact that it was dead in a region bereft of its natural predators. It wasn’t prey but roadkill, falling on the ground unclaimed by any alleged hunter. In times like these specifically, Cheadle wished for a large team, people who could spread out in a specified geographical region and capture animals for study, a well-equipped group to hasten the work and lessen the load, but the absence of this was her mistake and for that she preferred not to dwell on it.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to drive?” Pariston asked, eyeing the swollen crook of her elbow.

“Neither of us will drive in a minute,” she said. “We’re going to leave the car.”

“Where?”

“Here,” Cheadle pointed to a small natural clearing ahead that appeared to have been previously inhabited by some primates. Behind that clearing was an impasse, a jagged hill of fallen trees and mud and dead leaves. No car could drive up that. She looked at him. “Let’s hope you’re not wrong about our destination.”

Pariston smiled awkwardly. “I might totally be wrong.”

“Ah, joy.” She brought the car to a stop under a bent tree.

The forest was quieter in this corner, or perhaps it was the car’s engine that had nestled in her ears like that, and with its sudden absence the world expanded sideways and closed vertically on them. The sky was nothing but an extension of the earth under their feet, and like that time when she drove through Langres to Pariston’s villa, Cheadle sensed that same omnipresence, had that same feeling of being watched and observed, except this time it wasn’t the result of dread and pressing anxiety, not entirely, but something more palpable and tactile, as if suddenly she was aware how deep inside the forest she was and how far away, on either side, other humans were, and she could touch this very thought. She only had Pariston for company.

When she glanced at him, he was having the exact same feeling, but she didn’t know that.

“I’ll carry your bag for you.” Pariston offered once they opened the trunk and backseat doors. He took out his bag first. “What’s in this package, by the way?” He asked, hauling out the big wrapped box meant for Ging.

“A whiff of civilization.”

Her right arm by now completely limp and useless, numb and aching at the same time, Cheadle strapped the freezer tank to her waist and shoulders, contently complying with his offer to carry basically everything else.

With everything out of the car, the two left it under the tree and began their long, slippery climb up the hill. It was like a quagmire had risen and coalesced and formed a large protrusion in the earth, and one wrong footstep meant sinking down in the mud. Nothing they passed didn’t stick to them, and the higher they walked the trickier the terrain. Along the way she picked up a tall, fallen twig and inspected with it all the peculiar, grassy small holes they passed. They were depressions in the earth of varying circumferences and depths, most were shallow and filled with natural debris, spaced about randomly with no clear pattern. She wondered what they would look like from above, if she glanced down at them. Her eyes sought the massive canopy of branches over their heads, the little gray patches of sky peeking through, the rain droplets bouncing off leaves. A bird shrieked. She felt tiny.

Behind her Pariston was walking slowly, mapping his way through the mud and among the scattered holes, his arms disappearing under all the stuff he was carrying, damp hair stuck to his forehead. He felt her gaze and looked up. “How’s your arm?”

“I don’t know,” Cheadle said, digging her twig in the soil of an elevated ledge. “The physical response so far is normal, par for the course.”

“Do you think it might be worse than that?”

“It could be infected, yeah,” she replied. “But it’s too soon to know for sure, if it were the case.” Then she snorted, and found herself stopping to wait for him. “Are you worried I’ll pass it on to you?”

Pariston caught up to her, and stepped closer to readjust the slipped strap of her bag over her shoulder. “I’m worried you’ll get sick and die.”

“Is that so?”

“I think about it every day, since we arrived here.”

She rolled her eyes. “Joyfully, no doubt.”

“Not at all,” Pariston chuckled. “Your death will reduce my chances of survival by more than half. I can’t really risk losing you. You’re a virus Hunter, so I do ultimately benefit from being with you in this situation.”

If something occurred, if Cheadle was to die by any means, Pariston won’t only have less of a chance to survive a possible infection, but will also never retrieve his nen from her, which no doubt haunted him more. It would be gone forever, dissipating with her own body, her own nen, and perhaps this was her primary wall of defense against him. His aura was her hostage, and she knew he would do anything—was already doing everything—to get it back.

The nen-sapping, inscribed metal of which the ankle monitor was made was still a somewhat novel technology by the time she decided to deploy it. Even years after their discovery, nobody really knew for sure the mechanism by which they worked, or their potential drawbacks for the people involved. Not enough research was done to study the material and anything beyond its immediate effects; you were hard-pressed to find a Hunter or any nen user willing to subject themselves to voluntary nen loss, but it was nevertheless very appealing, and tempting, as a punishment. A soft, scrupulous kind of violence she approved of using and ended up inflicting on both of them.

“Besides, didn’t Gregory say the virus is everywhere?” Pariston continued, smiling at her. “Believe it or not, I find that reassuring for some reason. It’s all equal chance, and luck.” He fell silent for a moment, his eyes scouting the road ahead. They were close to the top of the hill. “We’re not any safer in the settlement than here, or elsewhere.”

“A virus is never everywhere, because it can’t _survive_ anywhere.” Cheadle countered. “It’s true that any number of these creatures could be suspect,” she pointed up at two flitting redstarlings hiding among branches, at a camouflaged reptile that flashed a bright yellow before disappearing again, at a hive of ant-eating wasps circling a peeling tree bark. “There are reservoir hosts and carriers and transmission routes and all these form a complex cycle; it could feel like a virus is omnipresent, but it's not the case. Wildlife absence around the settlement is strange, and it might be connected to the virus or a number of causes, and I need them for any further research, but regardless, I don’t think the words of a dying person should be taken at face value.”

“Do you regret it, killing her?”

Cheadle stopped. Her first instinct was to argue about his choice of words. No, she didn’t _kill_ Gregory but simply eased her death, helped her pass away, medically assisted in her suicide. It didn’t matter. She could say she didn’t think about it, but she did, and when Pariston asks whether she regrets it he doesn’t mean the regret of an immoral action but the regret of willing relinquishment of a vital study subject, for, debatably, moral reasons.

Does she regret not wringing a dying person suffering under a horrible affliction of every last bit of information?

“No.”

It might turn out to be a bad decision, and it wasn’t easy to make, but she had felt responsible, specifically, for Gregory’s condition. Every choice she’d made in the past decade seemed to coalesce in this one person, all the mistakes and missteps and strategy flaws, from sending a bunch of civilian convicts to the most dangerous place on the planet to coming here, alone with no assisting team and no proper equipment, with Pariston Hill, in a selfish move of what increasingly seemed to her like an unconscious but somehow premeditated act of self-annihilation.

Pariston didn’t know that, but freeing an international criminal condemned to house imprisonment and bringing him along on an unauthorized trip to the Dark Continent wasn’t the only law she broke. In a way, she sensed, strongly, after what she's done, that being here was safer than on mainland, and that, regardless of what happened to them here in the continent, neither she nor Pariston would be able to go back. Perhaps Ever.

For both of them now, a return would mean facing criminal prosecution. And really, in such a case she would have no defense. Humanitarian reasons? Then why only herself and the man she locked up? Why go save people nobody cared about, people _she_ had specifically chosen because nobody cared about them? The mission here was a front for more lucrative business, for safer investments, to maintain land claim, to preserve funding and support. The world at large had forgotten about the scientists here and didn’t care, and three weeks ago Cheadle, too, didn’t care, but now she did. Terribly so.

“I don’t regret it.” She said, but it was a whisper.

**III**

Finally, out of the thick green canopy and out in the open where rain had stopped falling, they reached the peak, and stood with heaving chests, overlooking the sprawling forest of gigantic red, flowering, poisonous dogwood that unraveled under the parting clouds overhead. The sun was melting down, a hazy golden eye staring right at them, casting droplets of pale oranges and pinks at the land below. It was breathtaking.

“Do you see it?” Pariston asked, lifting up his arm to point at a peak in the distance.

It was far away, its rustic, metallic color mingling with the red of the trees and camouflaged by them, and if one squinted hard enough to make out the form it encompassed, something akin to a merchant vessel took shape—a large ship, upturned, leaning forward, jutting up the sky at a nearly 50-degree angle, so conspicuous it was easy to miss.

From this distance, and perhaps at the distance from which Pariston had first noticed it, it did seem like just part of the natural landscape. He looked at Cheadle and smiled widely. “Who would’ve thought Ging would become a pirate.”

She rolled her eyes, even though, admittedly, the idea was pretty cool. “It’s a cruise ship. Docked inside land no less and not properly at that. We don’t even know if he’s there.”

“We have to dream big, Cheadle.”

“Fuck off,” she groaned. “You can’t even afford to say that.”

“I’m an optimistic person,” Pariston said, nonplussed, taking the lead this time around, his golden hair a warm orange under the sunset. “And you’re just excited.”

She didn’t reply to that. Another hour or a half and they’ll be there, by this ship. With careful steps she followed Pariston down the hill. Only the forest of brilliant red stood ahead.

Home to a species of symbiotic root ants, this relatively small Dark Continent dogwood forest was pristine and well-maintained thanks to these small creatures. Those trees were much more fragile than what initially appears, and could only survive among their kind, weak at supping and storing resources, easily overtaken and preyed upon by animals and other plants; the root ants helped by destroying any encroachers, especially other plants, having developed a collective immunity to the otherwise poisonous fruits, thereby ensuring the forest as their turf.

Everything around them was begging to be touched; the small, fuzzy leaves, the blood-red bark, the ant colonies swarming under their feet, but this ecosystem was widespread on the continent and one of the firsts to be studied. Cheadle had taken saplings back with her to the mainland, but as with everything else they shipped along, the trees traveled all the way only to die. Now, she found a small joy in seeing them again.

Step after step, the leaning ship was coming into full view.

It was a relatively small luxury ocean liner, steel hull peeling and rusting, the foremost of its three black funnels broken, grimy, foggy portholes lining sturdy steel plates, and everything past the watch bridge was buried underground, where it seemed the ship was either being slowly devoured by the earth or squeezed out from its depths; the vines and ivies which sprouted from the soil to crawl and creep over the ship’s hull were in flowering season, little pinwheels of yellow and purple blooming over the metal ruins.

Weakly, stubbornly, the ocean liner held onto its name with faded letters. _The Sea Cherry_.

The ship was of old design, the origin and private owner of which Pariston recognized almost instantly.

“So that’s where Orta Ritwik ended up.” He said, excited, turning to her with a huge smile, caught something tangible of a world that’s passed him only on TV.

Cheadle’s eyes passed over the old letters, recalling the meager, sketchy details of a disastrous ‘nowhere voyage’ that had left mainland about two years after the pioneering Black Whale trip, taken, puportedly, by a handful of world elites aboard the private cruiser of Orta Ritwik, an Iwanese billionaire and the owner of multiple companies specializing in the manufacture of the latest emerging security technologies, and hundreds of stocks and assets in various industries.

Last anyone knew of that man’s latest venture was that the ship had simply disappeared, along with all its passengers, somewhere in the ocean between Aiza and the Dark Continent. Scouting aircrafts couldn’t find the smallest traces of the ocean liner, and even satellite cameras caught nothing. The Sea Cherry had vanished completely.

Pariston’s eyes were filled with a menacing kind of glee, eating up the ship as it leaned over them, delighted at a hundred different things that rushed at him all at once, but mostly at the sight of a relic which once belonged to an old business rival. He had probably seen and heard the news about this mysterious disappearance on TV while the prisoner of his home.

Orta Ritwik had lobbied hard to attend Pariston’s trial. He was denied.

“Do you know that Ritwik couldn’t play poker at all,” he said, stopping for Cheadle to catch up. “so he used to sit at the table and have his teenage son feed him moves and tactics through a hidden earpiece.”

“Did you ever play with him?”

Pariston hummed. “Of course, I fed his gambling addiction for years.” He let out a wistful sigh. “He owed me millions, but alas.”

That was true. A whole legal team, of which she was a member, had to handle Pariston’s finances and business legacy in the months leading up to his trial. He himself owed people exorbitant amounts of money, having nonchalantly left behind a mind-bogglingly impressive trail of unresolved civil cases, unaddressed lawsuits, and a whole class of frustrated, angry lawyers. Many of his confiscated properties, owned temporarily by the Association, were sold to pay off his numerous debts and keep away the business rivals who yawed around the Association to feed off the juicy crumbs of Pariston Hill’s empire.

“I used to have brunch with his wife all the time, too.” He said with a coy smile, the sincere ruefulness of his tone implying they were some good old friends of his that he’s simply lost contact with and not the vicious monsters they were.

“What did you do with his wife?” Before the question was even done slipping out of her mouth, Cheadle wanted to swallow it back, regretting the very thought. It was the wrong question to ask. Why did she even care what Pariston did with Ritwik’s equally wealthy, equally unscrupulous wife? It was Cheadle herself, after all, who had to deal with the insane meltdown of his business relations. She knew more about that than she ever imagined she would.

Pariston laughed. “It was an innocent friendship, I swear.” A gleam nestled in his eyes. “Do you think their ghosts haunt the ship?”

“I hope they haunt _you,_ you absolute ghoul.”

The colorful paper trails he left behind spoke of an adrenaline junkie saved only marginally by pre-existing wealth but mostly by a bottomless well of cunning and charisma.

Pariston was rich, richer than most Hunters, certainly richer than her and Ging. He was rich in a way normal people couldn’t even begin to fathom, but nothing in all the history she dug up told of basic greed. He didn’t care. He poured money into everything he liked, madly infatuated and self-destructively reckless, bought things and sold them at a nearly equal rate, had no specific interest in any enterprise and dipped his toes into almost all fields, from fashion design and real estate to international pharmaceutical trade and sketchy tourism companies. Fraud, art forgery, money laundering, pyramid schemes. Obscure boutiques, picaresque seaside hotels, island resorts—it was thrilling and maddening to hold onto the tail of this wild animal and let it drag you through a universe of absurdity and senselessness.

Before all that, before the trial and everything leading up to it, Cheadle knew he had a separate life composed of civilian pleasures, but was hardly aware just how far and wide Pariston’s non-Hunter world extended. He had an entirely different existence, and interestingly but not surprisingly, a whole slew of scorned, vindictive, disillusioned, equally irrational lovers who had managed—in guile and luck and in some miraculous force of cosmic protection—to enter Pariston’s world this intimately and stay alive to talk about it.

A con artist and a madman, he was fascinating, inimitable, and sinking so thoroughly, for months and months, in the idiosyncrasies of his universe was dangerous and toxically titillating.

In comparison to that, this ship looming over them felt completely, utterly insignificant, except that truly, and as Pariston said, Ging was, indeed, up there.

He stood on the ship’s bow, looking down at them.

“Yo!”

“A lovely home you have there!” Pariston called.

“I know.”

“Where’s the red carpet?”

With a loud, booming clangor, Ging unfurled a ladder that swung down perpendicular to the ship and slammed the ground underneath, kicking up dirt. A bunch of birds shrieked and then fell silent.

“Climb up, suckers.”

Pariston stopped to let her go first, offering her a little courteous bow and a restrained smile. There was a kind of curiosity and giddiness in being here; it was so different from the long, never ending hallways and closed walls of the settlement.

Up on the lopsided deck, Pariston, feet firmly on the wood, put down their bags. “Cheadle is hurt.”

She glared at him. “It’s nothing, just a yellow fly bite.”

“Where?” Ging asked, searching her with his eyes to find the damage. Cheadle shook her right shoulder, the only part of her bitten arm that she was able to move. Ging took a step closer to her and grabbed her arm to pull up her sleeve, making a face at the reddened, swollen flesh, at the white residue in the crook of her elbow. She still felt his hand even after he let go. “Yeah, I have something for it. Come on. Watch your steps.”

He walked ahead, down, in sprints and slides, towards the once-glorious, grand, branching staircase with a mechanical moving lid that connected the deck to the uppermost floor below and which was now open, the low-hanging sun setting the golden staircase balusters aglitter, pushing against the ends of dark shadows concealing what appeared like a carpeted bar and lounge, managing to light up a large, dusty space empty of couches, chairs and tables that seemed to extend all the way down to the stem of the ship, bigger at this unnatural angle.

Pariston stood beside her on the woozy deck, atop the staircase, looking down at the abandoned lounge. “I hope you’ve prepared nice rooms for us.”

“Heh,”

“Are we going to be sleeping in balcony cabins?” Pariston insisted, following Ging down the golden stairs. “Bunk beds?”

“Hammocks.” Cheadle said.

“Suites.” Ging said, hearing their prancing on this jagged road of a staircase. It was a little strange, to have company here, to hear sounds made not by animals or plants but by other people, and as always with cases like these, a little part of him regretted their presence.

Ging rarely wandered this area, mostly confining himself to the second deck where he had worked the hardest to revive this ship. It was large, and if he wanted any kind of order he needed to limit his moving range. Besides, he didn’t actually spend much time here, or maybe he spent too much time that even the briefest of outings felt like a long journey.

“You’ve re-architectured the whole ship, didn’t you?” Cheadle asked from somewhere behind him, her voice echoing through the empty lounge, and when he turned to them he saw her hand trailing the right-sided, curved wooden bar, all shelves behind it pristine but empty, back to its initial state after he fixed them, before stocking and refurbishment.

“Not everything,” Ging admitted, stopping once he realized they were interested in the space around them, splitting left and right to look around, their boots leaving dirt marks on the fuzzy green carpet. His toes sunk into the loose tendrils of it.

“Did you empty it?” Pariston asked, still toting bags over his shoulders.

“Only the furniture.”

“And the glassware, the booze?”

Ging smirked. “They took most of it with them.”

“You mean the surviving passengers?” Cheadle asked.

“Possibly, or raiders.” Ging said. “I found it like this.”

Pariston hummed, looking up at the round windows that let in a faint orange light, at the big, tilting chandelier. “I hope they didn’t take everything.”

“There’s still enough alcohol on this ship to inebriate a herd of Iwanese elephants.” Ging said.

Pariston’s face lit up. “Didn’t see any of them, perchance?”

“Could have,” he replied to the laden question, knowing whom the other man was referring to. “There’s more people here than you’d think.”

“Did you have contact with any of them?” Cheadle asked, already accusatory.

He turned to her. “What kind of contact?”

“The physical kind.”

“Physical how?”

She pinned him with a look. “The kind that could transmit deadly disease, Ging.”

“I’ve interacted with dozens of people, I don’t know. That’s why you’re here.”

Cheadle stopped. “So you might be infected?”

“Do you think I could be?”

“Do _you_ think you could be?”

Ging grimaced. “I know you’re gonna try to examine me whether I want to or not.”

“Correct.”

“You’ll find out then.”

She groaned. “Why do you have to make things harder than they have to be?”

“ _You’re_ the one who always makes things harder than they have to be.” Ging countered, turning away from her. She was going to say something but she swallowed it, lapsing into begrudging silence the rest of the way. Pariston was way behind them, quietly enjoying their bickering as he toured leisurely around the lounge.

Did she want him to lie sick on the ground, begging her to help him? There was a certain methodology he acknowledged about her work, and knew that to her he was infected until scientifically proven not, which was reasonable enough. Ging did need a medical checkup one way or the other; he didn’t actually know if he was infected or not, and he wouldn’t have asked them to come here if the answer was positive; he would’ve rode it out like he did most other infections he acquired through the years, but he also suspected this one was something else entirely, if the things he saw were anything to go by. He had survived infectious illnesses before, diseases that killed hundreds of others, some wide-spread, some highly localized where he just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, but back then his body was more resilient, his ability to beat back sickness stronger, and despite all efforts and pretenses, it wasn’t like that anymore.

Did Cheadle sense that? Each time he glanced at her she looked away.

“So, what’s on the itinerary today?” Pariston asked once they crossed to the other end of the main lounge, this time descending another set of branching staircases that led down to the second deck, where with a couple flicks the whole deck lit up.

“Food and rest.” Ging said, standing under the golden chandeliers that hung low, heavy and elaborate, lining the ceiling of a sizable, straightened, red and gold carpeted floor of the second deck’s common hall. Doors lined the walls around them, and the other two took a minute to adjust to the change in walking angle. Suddenly with normal ground under them, they just stopped.

“How long have you been working on this?” Pariston asked, peeking inside an open door. The room was a modest cabin, filled with junk.

Ging shrugged, continuing ahead to the rooms he had for them. “Three, four years. I don’t remember.”

“By yourself?”

“Do you see anyone else here?” Pariston came to a stop beside him in front of a red wooden door. Ging opened it. “Yours.”

The two of them entered the suite, and he stood back, letting Pariston walk farther in where he finally let go of all the bags he was carrying, heaving a long sigh as he straightened up and looked around, measuring the room with his eyes, strolling over to the big, sprawling jacuzzi balcony that would have overlooked the open sea in better circumstances, but which now hung over a batch of red dogwood trees. Pariston moved around, appraising the suite with an incredulous look.

“You didn’t change anything?” He asked, bending over the silk bed sheets, inspecting the texture between his fingers.

“Nope, still the same furniture and bedding, just cleaned and dusted.”

Pariston shook his head in disappointment, allowing himself to gingerly sit on the bed. “What a cheap man.”

“Who, the billionaire?”

“You take them under your wing, you raise them, you shower them with all the luxury the world has to offer, and then they grow up to have shit taste.” Pariston sighed, hands on knees, rueful. “Look at this color,” he pointed to the sheets. “I’m embarrassed for him.”

Ging didn’t know what was wrong with the color. It looked fine to him.

When he started working on reconstructing and restoring the ship, the cabins and rooms didn’t interest him much, mostly because they were left by their occupants, besides almost turning upside down, pretty much intact. Anything that slid or fell off to break did; TVs, mirrors, statues—he’d worked on those, too, fixing what he could, shuffled their placements but didn’t make any grand changes. The bigger rooms, the common halls and lounges, the inner swimming pool area, the theater, the dance hall, those were what he had his eyes on. Converted to workshops and archives, they were more useful to him. He only up-righted the floors of cabins and suites and kitchens to preserve the structural integrity with the rest of the decks. And because he was bored and desperately needed a side project to occupy him and his every waking moment.

He glanced behind his back at the door. Cheadle was out of sight.

“How’s the settlement?”

Pariston got off the bed to continue inspecting the suite, heard Ging’s question but waited a moment to answer as he entered the bathroom. “It’s great, I love it.” His voice echoed out, perky and playful. He grabbed a couple things, put them down. “I hope you didn’t have to wait long for us to come.”

“Nah, I’m fine.” Ging wasn’t expecting them to come this early, anyway.

“There’s no toilet paper in here.” Pariston said, peeking his head out of the bathroom.

“There’re towels.”

Pariston slunk back into the bathroom. “It’s pretty spacious. Is there running water?”

“Not consistently.”

Pariston stepped out of the bathroom again, whole this time. “Pardon?”

“Depends on whether the fresh water generator wants to work or if I feel like fixing it.” Ging said, shrugging. “The ship still has a supply of clean water, but the distiller breaks constantly, and so does the heater; the ship is far away from seawater, and to fill the tanks I have to manually pump water from the nearest river, so,” he gave Pariston a look. “Washing in said nearest river is less trouble.”

“But there’s water now, I hope?” Pariston asked, pushing his sticky hair back. His shirt was stuck to his chest and back, the veins on his arms standing out from dehydration, his long fingers bonier than Ging remembered them, his legs skinnier. He still looked the same, in the fading light clawing inside the room, encumbered by couches and tables and a water bearer statue that looked different in shadows.

“Yeah, there is.”

In the darkness of the settlement room, Pariston was all skin, less of him than there was before.

“I’m going in then,” Pariston smiled, started unbuttoning his shirt, sat down to take off his shoes, unzip his pants. “You can join.”

They never showered together. Or did they? Ging couldn’t remember. They never had that kind of thing. He didn’t feel like it.

There was a medicine cabinet in the suite, tucked behind a curtain. He took a small bottle and a roll of gauze out of it.

“I’ll go find Cheadle.”

He caught a glimpse of Pariston’s naked butt before the man disappeared inside the bathroom, leaving the door open. “Right, she brought a package for you. It’s on the floor. The blue one.” Water started. “I brought you a little thing as well, but that’s for later.”

Ging looked at the package, sealed tightly among the bags and heavy kit, taciturn between them. He left the room.

The hallway outside was long and empty, silent but for the distant, muffled sound of falling water, like it was dripping right under his feet. Cheadle wasn’t around, but her bags were, dropped at the doorway of an opened room.

He stepped in, soundlessly, the room draped in fading blue, the white, round carpet darker in the dissipating light. She was on the balcony, her back to him behind a glass door she had enough mind to close.

The floor creaked under him, and his foot caught on a shirt chucked carelessly on the floor. He picked it up, put it on the nearest chair, knew she could sense his presence before he tapped on the glass. She only offered him a half-turn, then went back to viewing the expanse of forest engulfing the balcony.

“How did you know this was your room?” He asked, sliding the door open, walking to stand beside her over the railing.

Cheadle shrugged. “I didn’t. It just smelled lived.”

“Quite a view, huh?”

“It is,” she said. “I prefer it to the ocean, at least.”

Then they fell into silence, neither relenting to talk first. He snuck glances at her, at the slight downturn of her lips, the forefinger tapping gently, rhythmically, on the railing, the withdrawn look in her eyes. Clad in a sleeveless undershirt, he could see the freckles condensed over her bare shoulders and sparse farther down so that he could count the ones around her wrists. The bite marks on the crook of her left elbow were whitening and oozing.

“Here, for your arm.” He took the small bottle of salve out of his pocket, made to alleviate pain and swelling, and gave it to her. “It’ll sting.”

Cheadle took the bottle from his hand, still forlorn and reticent. With a peck of her nen, she opened the little sacks of putrid blood that had bubbled on her skin. Ging handed her a piece of the gauze to wipe them off. “How did it happen?”

“Cutting open a mangled animal’s carcass.”

Sufficiently drained, she dipped her fingers in the salve and tapped it over the little punctures.

“What’s upsetting you?” He asked, watching her wrap the wound with the rest of the gauze.

Her throat exhausted a half-hearted chuckle before it was even out. “Don’t ask me that. Where’s Pariston?”

“Taking a shower.”

She sighed. “I should take one too,”

“You can sleep first,” Ging said. “You look like shit.”

“Thanks, but no.”

Ging turned around, resting his elbows on the railing, his back to the sudden gust of hot wind that blew their way. “How’s everything in the settlement? Did you find something?”

“A flesh-eating pathogen, a deformed stomach fetus, a seemingly magical tree, and a bunch of papers I can’t make sense of,” she said, sighing to the trees around them. “It’s a lot of work, and everywhere I look is a mystery I can’t solve. People there don’t like me very much.”

“Why would they?”

Cheadle snorted. “Yeah, I know.”

“I was surprised, that you came here on your own,” Ging admitted, his gaze turning from the darkening room in front of him to the last bits of light reflected in her hair. “I imagined you’d be bringing a team for a situation like this.”

She frowned. “And I imagined you’d still have at least some of your own team members with you.”

“I’m by myself now.” Ging said, didn’t address her attempt at deflection. The room behind the glass turned completely dark, only a column of orange light from the hallway seeped through the door crack.

Cheadle looked at him, the mean contortion of her face gone, leaving only a soft frown. “What happened to them?”

“Some died, but most of them just disappeared,” he said, remembering the last time he went out to search for them alone and came back alone. “They have the same problem in the settlement, right?”

Cheadle nodded. “The majority of their team was lost to unexplained disappearances. People just vanished; they’d leave the settlement never to return, leaving no traces behind.” She looked away from him, back to the trees and dimming sky. “They wanted me to search for them. I said it’s not worth it.”

And she wasn’t wrong at that, Ging thought. He knew the settlement had no people and no resources to spare, and dealing with a viral outbreak on top of that. He himself had tried, for years, consistently, and nothing ever came up—not a piece of cloth, of hair, no footsteps or abandoned encampments. It was like none of his teammates had ever stepped foot on the continent. Only him trekking the wilderness, barely material.

“What’s that you said about a fetus?” He asked, because it sounded familiar.

“Are we gonna talk about Gregory first?” Cheadle fixed her eyes on him, like she was trying to incriminate him of something he was yet to say. “Because I found that fetus inside her.”

Ging stared back at her, almost certain what she was implying. “I have nothing to do with that thing, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

“They said she had a lover, outside the settlement.”

Ging squared his shoulders defensively. “It wasn’t me.”

“Do you know who it was, then?”

“No,” he said. “and I don’t think there was one.”

She sighed glumly in the face of his resolute answer. He wasn’t lying, not entirely. He did know Gregory for a prolonged period of time, sometimes intimately, and they had a mutually beneficial, openly opportunistic relationship; he guided her through the forests in her research stints and she supplied him with the latest discoveries in her field at the settlement. And they had fucked, several times, before her illness, or so he believed until a couple months earlier.

Ging had suspected her intentions from the beginning, and came to quickly confirm her dishonesty. She was smart but erratic, temperamental, selfish, uncooperative and easily distracted, which didn’t make her a very good scientist, but would have made her a good Hunter. When he said as much, the resentment in her eyes told him all he needed to know.

She was ashamed of their meetings, and her sense of belonging to the settlement was shaken every time she asked for his help. Gregory had several connections in the settlement that seemed to matter a great deal to her but which she couldn’t maintain, a thing—he now thought—they unconsciously bonded over. He had led her in circles for months, gauging her out, realizing that at one point she was coming to him not because she was searching for something, but _escaping_ from something, and then, gradually, her sudden appearances became few and far between, and after a while he stopped seeing her altogether.

Until the strange night of floods and crying children and crazy people in the woods that brought him back to the settlement for the first time in years, Gregory had disappeared out of his life.

He looked at Cheadle’s despondent face. He should have contacted her earlier.

“Did you have any physical contact with Gregory?” She asked.

There was no point in lying about this. The case transcended the personal. “I did, yeah.”

At least he didn’t have to state outright it was sexual. Cheadle already knew.

“And when you visited her in the ward, did you stay protected?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you know she was sick during your hookups?”

“I guessed she was. She didn’t say anything about it.” Ging answered, the image of a healthy Gregory muddier in his mind than her last months of deterioration and wasting, lesser with each subsequent visit.

“Did you know this fetus existed inside her?”

“Not until you mentioned it,” Ging said, honestly. “I think I know what it is. I’ve seen a couple cases like it before, with animals.”

This seemed to interest her. “What animals?”

“Redback elks, as far as I know.” Ging said. “I believe they might be on the verge of extinction.”

Where once they were abundant in the region, redback elks began diminishing in numbers with each passing season. Fierce but sketchy, massive but astonishingly nimble, the redback elk wasn’t the animal that fascinated him the most in the Dark Continent, but certainly one of the most beautiful. Ging saw less and less of them each year until he could count the remaining ones on the fingers of his hands.

Only one remained, at least around here; a female elk that came and went alone, more a phantasm than a real creature, an approximation of a once flourishing species, like a ghost, and Ging couldn’t catch her. He couldn’t even _find_ her. This specific elk was his secret, and knowing Cheadle will ask him to track them for research purposes, he found himself holding even tighter onto it.

Ging sensed that if he set out to find this specific animal, she will disappear forever. He had decided a while back to simply let her come to him whenever she pleases.

“Is Pariston still showering?” Cheadle suddenly asked, turning towards the room.

Ging wondered what kind of dynamic those two had going on this time. He had noted from the moment they stepped on the upper deck and close enough to him that they smelled more alike than the last time he saw them. It wasn’t just the soap they were probably forced to share with the rest of the settlement’s inhabitants, but a certain proximity, an enforced closeness, he imagined, where neither really left the other’s side for too long.

Obviously Cheadle wasn’t comfortable letting him out of sight, and Pariston was remarkably adaptable, if it meant his survival. Besides, he had little choice in the matter, even when it seemed he did—Cheadle had a certain kind of control over him in a way that most people will never know or understand. The shackles tight around both their ankles weren’t lost on Ging, and under the ring of inscribed metal he could glimpse burns that circled their skin, shaped like the little prison where both languished.

He wasn’t there for the trial but he was there for most things that preceded it, and specifically when the nen-sapping metal was suggested as a long-term punishment. He said it was a bad idea, then, and still believed that. Little studied and fundamentally vile, Pariston was a perfect primary test subject, except to turn him into one Cheadle had to become one herself, first.

Ging didn’t know what might happen when Pariston got back his nen—and he was going to get it back—but it’s been a curiosity of his for a long time. What damage will they both incur? Will the retrieved nen even be the same? Will Cheadle’s nen alter in any significant way? Was it already altered?

What kind of void filled Pariston’s being, without his nen?

When they left the room to see what he’s up to, they found him on the bed. Hair still wet, back rising and falling softly, a pillow between his thighs, sprawled naked on his stomach, Pariston was in a deep, tropical sleep.

“You’ve been working him a lot, I bet.” Ging said, standing with her at the suite’s door, watching Pariston’s body mired in shadows. What a view.

Cheadle scoffed quietly, and he noticed her making a concerted effort not to glance Pariston’s way. “ _He_ ’s been working _me_.” She stepped closer and stared him right in the eyes. “His presence is psychological torture, Ging.”

He couldn’t help finding that amusing. “Why?”

“ _Because_. Everything.” She hissed, flailing her arms. “I can’t stop thinking one day I’ll wake up from my sleep to find him hovering over me with a knife to my throat.”

Ging gazed at Pariston then back at her. “You think he wants revenge?”

“Of course he wants revenge,” she said, frowning. “As soon as I give him back his nen he’ll stop playing nice, and when that happens I’ll have to deal with it alone because fuck knows where _you_ might be by then.”

“You don’t have to give him back his nen.” He said, and observed the subtle changes in her expression, the way her gaze flitted for a second, her lips closed. She had already considered that.

It took Cheadle a moment to say anything.

“I gave him my word.”

Ging shrugged. “Then you’ll have to deal with the consequences.”

“I know.” She whispered, her gaze downcast.

His eyes traced the gilded edges of the carpet, illuminated by the hallway light. “I thought this could be an opportunity for you two to get closer.” Ging himself didn’t know how serious he was about this. The thought was a little funny.

“Stop with these mini social experiments of yours, please,” Cheadle swallowed a sound between a laugh and a groan. “No amount of hardships in the world will make me bond with Pariston.”

“Why didn’t you kill him then?”

“Because it would’ve made me as bad as him.” Cheadle said. “It would’ve meant I’m just like him.”

To her this was the truth, or at least the truth she wanted to believe, and Ging believed her belief in it. A long time from now, he will ask her the same question again, and she will give him a different, perhaps more honest answer. But for now, he didn’t argue.

“He said you brought a package for me.”

“Yeah,” Cheadle said, pointing with a feeble finger to the blue box on the floor. “I take it you haven't opened it yet.”

Ging walked to the package and picked it up, then both of them walked quietly away from the room and towards Cheadle’s, where he flicked a couple ceiling fixtures to light up the dark suite. He put the box on the ground and sat down with it between his legs.

“Gon sent you something.” Cheadle said, sitting down as well, the box between them. He noticed her gaze flickering between the package and his left leg, and now Ging not only dreaded what Gon might have sent but also that she has already noticed what’s wrong with him.

As he started opening the box, she didn’t say anything about it.

Ging saw what seemed like a lot of clothes. He looked up at her incredulously. “These are from Gon?”

She pushed back her glasses, less to adjust them and more because she was suddenly self-conscious. “No. These are from me.”

Ging smirked. “Underwear?”

“Among other things,” she said, defensively. “I’m frankly surprised you’re not running around in a loincloth.”

“My balls would slip right out of it; it would be really uncomfortable.”

“And potentially scarring to every unfortunate animal in the vicinity.”

Ging chuckled. “Yeah.”

She smiled. “I thought ‘what would I need if I were alone for years on what amounts to an isolated island?’ and I figured it would be clean underwear,” she said. “But again, there was a very strong chance that you’re perfectly happy running naked in the mountains.”

“I did do that.”

She tilted her head, unsurprised.

Ging continued to unpack the box, pulling out a toothbrush, an electric razor, a big hairbrush. He grabbed the latter, wooden and heavy with sharp, thick teeth, and then he felt a rush of awkwardness and shyness at knowing it was a really good type for his hair. Cheadle seemed to feel it, too.

“Is this too much?” She asked, chuckling, reaching for some of the items he pulled out then deciding to leave them. “It is too much, isn’t it? I mean, I thought you’d need them. You _do_ need them, if I’m completely honest, but you don’t _have_ to use them, but it would be great if you did.”

He put the brush down beside him. “I won’t use them if you make it weird.”

“Make it weird?” Cheadle winced back. “ _You_ ’re weird. This whole _situation_ is weird. I’m not _making_ anything weird; if anything, I’m bringing a modicum of normalcy to your world.”

“Cheadle, you’re making it weird.”

She groaned and stood up. “You know what, I don’t care.” She walked briskly to the doorway where she left her bag and started pulling clothes out of it. “I’m gonna take a shower, and by the time I’m done you better not be here, because maybe _I_ too would love to sleep naked on a king-sized bed, so, you know, just not to make anything ‘weird’.”

Ging followed her with his eyes as she strutted about the room like a concussed ant, flitting from corner to corner in search of towels and a place to put her clothes and her bag and the fluffy cushion she’d picked up for no reason and then forgot why and where to return it.

“Cheadle.”

“What?”

“Thank you,” he said, smiling. “I appreciate it.”

She stopped at the bathroom door, her arms saddled with clothes she probably didn’t even need and one towel too many. She nodded, a little less incensed. “I’m examining you tonight, so prepare yourself, and a clean room,” she said. “And you better be honest about what happened to your leg, too.”

The sound of the bathroom door shutting behind her echoed through the room. The mention of his leg made it hurt, as if it consciously responded to the acknowledgment of its injury. Where was Cheadle even going to start with that? Ging himself hasn't looked at it in a while.

Even after she went in, it took him a while to leave the room, still sitting in front of the box, strewn around him all the things she brought him—smelling of her, of her apartment—and at the bottom of the box was a single thing that didn’t look like the others, and he was unsure whether to open it now or not, whether to open it at all.

From the appearance of it, it seemed Gon sent him an album, or a scrapbook, wrapped in a peculiar way and with a kind of paper that told him Cheadle had probably received it unwrapped, opened it and then wrapped it in a way as to make it appear pristine and untouched. She did a pretty good job, and that was precisely what gave her little curiosity away. Either that or his son had gotten absurdly good at gift wrapping.

Ging didn’t open it, he only returned everything to the box and hauled it up over his shoulder. “Meet me down at the third deck when you’re done.”

A muffled ‘okay’ came from under water.

Barely here for an hour and Ging was already feeling this place louder than it’s ever been.

**III**

Pariston woke up in complete darkness to a bone-crunching, tears-inducing headache. The incessant pulsing of it drove him out of slumber and with his eyes open to black, it took him a second to realize he wasn’t sleeping anymore. He stayed on the bed, regulating his breathing, his limbs heavy, sticky, separate from him, dragging his body down, his head a boulder he couldn’t lift off the pillow.

They had closed the door on him, for one reason or another. The room was vast and featureless, and he felt that the bed itself was untethered, floating somewhere above ground, and if he were to swing his feet off it they would hang in the air. How long had he been sleeping? He only remembered almost falling asleep in the shower.

For the first time in over a month he woke up to a room empty of Cheadle, and apparently his head wasn’t thankful at all for that.

He propped himself up, taking with him the edge of the sheet that stuck to his chest, then he sat up upright, the grating heaviness in his body slowly shifting to a feathery, tingling translucence.

The habit of reaching for a phone upon waking up had been sucked out of him years ago so that when his arm unconsciously reached for the nightstand his whole body jolted. Slowly, a little removed, he dragged his hand back to his side. Maybe it had to do with the hotelesque experience of being in a room aboard a cruise ship.

Pariston parted his lips, opened his mouth wide, yawned himself into being. If he manages to forget about it, and if he's lucky, the headache will go away on its own in an hour or two.

In the darkness, he searched for a light to turn on or a door to open. Finally his fingers landed on a light switch that turned on the soft orange lamp of a huge walk-in closet; it beckoned him like a secret passage, and Pariston was only too disappointed to see it bereft of any clothes. There weren’t even any hangers and no indications that there was ever anything in it.

He stood on his toes to reach the high upper shelves and passed his hands over them. Also nothing. Pariston moved down, tapping the upright wood boards, touching the other ends with the tips of his middle fingers, scraping his nails in the spaces between the shelves and the timber behind them.

Then, just when he was about to let it go, a board came off.

A dark, inky stairway appeared before him, leading down.

Pariston smiled. Of course Ging wouldn’t have fixed and redesigned the ship without adding some hidden pathways. Deciding to leave this little discovery for another time, he returned the board to its place and walked out in search for his bag.

He might as well fill this empty closet with his own stuff.

**III**


	8. Summer Feastings Under Ordinary Circumstances

Whoever looted the meds from these cabinets took most of the good painkillers and antidepressants. Cheadle passed her gaze over the sparsely-stocked shelves of the ship’s infirmary, reading the names on each little box, then sifted through a drawer chockfull of blister packs filled with predominantly expired pills.

“Do you regularly take any of these?”

“No.”

Cheadle wiped her forehead. It was raining again, the ship a piece of burning metal. “Did you ever take any of them?”

“Maybe?”

“Which one?”

“Must’ve been a painkiller.”

And he must’ve resisted taking it for months.

“You can take all these pills to the settlement if you want.”

“They’re expired or about to be.” And for a suspicious time, too.

She turned to Ging, sitting on the examination bed, waiting, restless, for her to finish prodding him. He had found time to shower and shave, too, sitting only in one of the boxers she got him, a thick roll of old bandages conveniently hiding his injured leg.

“Are you gonna unwrap whatever monstrosity you’re hiding under there?” She asked, pulling a chair to sit opposite him.

“How did you notice?” Ging asked, his fingers toying with the frayed edges of the bandages.

“You’re weirdly shifting your weight,” she said, then shrugged consolingly when he seemed annoyed by this. “Don’t worry, it’s not that noticeable. I might not have found it if I wasn’t already looking for something.”

He was, after all, pretty good at concealing his damage.

Cheadle gestured for him to lift his leg up to her. His foot rested on her thigh, then her hands went around his calf, trying to locate the end of the roll.

“It’s pretty gross.” Ging said casually, leaning back on his forearms.

“I’m pretty sure I’ve seen grosser things.” She groaned internally. The bandage was endless; he had wrapped it like one seals a vault with the intention of never opening it again. To him, not seeing something directly pretty sure meant he didn’t have to deal with it. Immediately or ever. “You took painkillers for it?”

“For what else?” He said, waving his hand impatiently over the leg stretched out on her lap.

Little by little, the bandages started pooling down on the floor, and the thinner they became the clearer she could make out the misshapen mess made of his limb.

Completely uncovered before her, her eyes stared at a scarred, rived, deeply dented wreck of a leg. Her fingers hovered over sinkholes in skin and muscle that ran the length of his shin, concavities around his calf attempting to mend themselves with new, fledgling skin tissue. All this damage was the result of some sharp object, a knife or a scalpel, she guessed, and not by someone who knew how to use either surgically.

Like a piece of half-kneaded clay, Ging’s lower left leg sat in her lap, and every time she glanced somewhere she saw new scars and dints.

The two of them remained silent. Cheadle didn’t look up at his face and he wouldn’t have met her gaze if she did. The neon lights overhead made everything under her hands a little darker.

“How can you even walk with this?”

“I don’t know, I just do.”

Cheadle wanted to sink her face in her hands. “Don’t tell me you did what I think you did, Ging.”

“Worse,” he chuckled awkwardly. “I did it several times, and failed.”

This time she let herself groan out loud.

“What?” He was about to withdraw his leg off her but she held onto his foot.

Cheadle glared. “Auto debridement? Really?”

“Yes, really.”

“What were you even trying to remove?”

Ging grimaced, uncomfortable with the scrutiny. “The unnatural tissue that was growing in my leg.”

“Like a sarcoma?”

“I thought so at first, but I don’t think it was that,” he said. “They were several, seemed to move around, protrude in different spots, press on nerves.”

“So you went poking around with a knife wherever you felt one.”

Ging shrugged, said nothing.

“Well, did you manage to remove them all?”

“Yeah.”

“Does it hurt now?”

“Yeah.”

Cheadle sighed. “Okay, I’m gonna do a quick test. Tell me where it hurts most,” she looked him in the eye. “and don’t lie.”

Surrendering to his situation, Ging fell back on the examination bed with a frustrated groan. “I knew I should’ve hid it better.”

“Shut up. You know you need this.” Cheadle suspended her hand run over his left leg, pooling nen in her palm, then slowly set it down over his ankle, coiling her fingers gently around the bone. “I’ll increase the pressure little by little and move up slowly, alright?”

He nodded.

“Relax.”

“I’m relaxed.”

“Really?” Cheadle pressed his ankle harder. He flinched. “Because I feel like you’re about to kick me with all the nen you’ve punched up in your leg.”

Ging sighed, loosening his shoulders.

“You can lay your leg on the bed if you’re uncomfortable like this.”

“It’s fine. Just get it done with.”

She pressed over the lower end of his shin. He winced. “How about up here?” She placed her thumb in a small dint. His jaw tightened.

And like that, her hands traced up to his knee, trailing a path of pain and nerve damage that made her wonder how his leg has remained functional in any capacity. Her fingers pressed his dented calf, her nen sinking down to his tibia, noticed him swallowing back pain. “Does it hurt too much?”

“It’s bearable.”

“Why did you do this to yourself?” She asked, sliding her fingers over thick, discolored scar tissue, tracing down a particularly nasty contusion. “You could’ve gone down to the settlement, they could’ve helped you.”

“I didn’t think it was a big deal,” Ging said, staring up at the ceiling. “I thought I could handle it by myself.”

“By mangling your leg like this? Repeatedly?” She didn’t know how to begin describing to him just how much damage he’s caused himself. Most of it irreparable.

His tone was flippant and casual, but she sensed there was something missing. Ging was single-minded but not idiotic, he believed in and sought people’s expertise; if he believed that the settlement people could help him he would’ve gone to them.

“Shouldn’t you have learned enough medical nen by now?”

Ging twisted his mouth. “Learning is one thing, applying it is another,” he said with a half-hearted shrug, seemingly content that there were some things he’s never going to know or be good at. “I know the basics.”

“The basics?” Cheadle scoffed. “You’re forty-four, you should know more than the basics.”

“I don’t have the sensibility for it,” he propped himself up on his elbows to regard her with irritation. “Everything I try to heal heals weirdly, I always do a botched job at it. Whenever I try, something goes wrong." He waved his hand. "I can do broken bones and small injuries.”

“It’s not that impossible to learn properly, if you actually put effort.” She said, but her voice carried little conviction, and that seemed to annoy him more than what she said.

“I wouldn’t ask you why you don’t know how to excavate in the middle of a desert or distinguish between hieratic Katamese and demotic Swaian.”

Cheadle frowned. “But this is different,” she said, hating how this conversation was turning. “You're different.”

“I can’t do it well,” Ging returned her frown. " _You_ know that.” He pointed at her with an accusatory finger, and looked just about ready to snatch his leg away and leave the whole room.

And she did know. The long, gnarly scar that crossed the length of her abdomen can attest and confirm. Apparently his skills at nen healing haven’t gotten any better in the last twenty years.

Cheadle pondered saying that she didn’t mean to be condescending, but instantly knew she would be dishonest. She _was_ being a little condescending, and he knew it. Apologizing wouldn’t work for Ging that way, so she decided to just own up to it.

“I guess not even you can have it all.”

“Yeah.” He shrugged, gazing contemplatively sideways, in his own head.

Strange, she thought, that through all the years of his absence, she never wondered if he’s injured or in pain, probably never imagined it, even. Because, mostly, Cheadle now thought, she never saw him in such a state.

Duly late for annual medical checkups mandatory for all Zodiacs, Ging would show up months after the date and sometimes not at all, had to be contacted multiple times as a reminder, was more likely to run into her in one of her far away clinics than in the headquarters’ infirmary where he’d demand she do everything quickly because of course he had somewhere else to run to. The world couldn’t wait, even when he himself wasn’t in a hurry.

Cheadle searched his profile, for what, she didn’t know, and then realized that this was the first time since seeing him here that she took a good, long look at his face—not in some attempt to find wounds or some sign of illness or to refamiliarize herself—but just to look. Because she had missed him, and didn’t think she had missed him this much until this very moment.

He had the kind of face that made him seem distant and unapproachable, a natural frown made harder by a pair of ever-skeptical eyes that found you first and left you first, and yet it was a face that spoke openly of his disposition—moody, daring, evasive, guarded, confident, endlessly curious, and charmingly, insufferably childish.

That face hasn’t changed much, but some things about Ging himself have. She couldn’t tell what, now, with any certainty, and maybe she never will, but for a moment she let herself be glad that he’s here, and alive, and still tenacious and prideful enough to walk on a leg past saving in any real sense.

“Is it comfortable?” She asked.

“The general atmosphere under your judgmental scrutiny?”

“The underwear.”

“Ah, yeah,” he shifted a little. “Smells like you.”

Cheadle lowered her head, bit the inside of her cheek. “I had to keep them at my apartment for a while, before taking them to the seaplane. It’s probably the detergent, since—”

“I’m not complaining.”

She smiled, hoped he couldn’t see it with her head cast down.

“So, are we done here?”

Cheadle cleared her throat, realizing that she was still holding his leg, a hand over his thigh. She slunk her hand away. “Mostly.” She said, glancing down at the bandages piled at her feet. “Are there any clean bandages here? I’ll give you some antibiotics, too, to ward off infection.” She looked at him. “You’ll have to clean it regularly and take care of it. No more sealing it away like it’s a curse.”

Ging gave her an incredulous look. “What, not gonna do anything about it?”

“There’s nothing to be done about it.” Cheadle said that honestly, and withheld the rest selfishly. She didn’t tell him that his leg was probably going to get worse because of his botched surgery, that the damage to his tibia and fibula was irreversible, and that sooner or later he’ll have to be without it entirely. Perhaps he already knew.

“Whether it gets better or worse is on you.”

Cheadle didn’t tell him that it would be better to just amputate it because she sensed, strongly and without an inkling of doubt—and perhaps erroneously, but she didn’t consider that—that saying this to him would make him run away. It’s better, she believed, that he think it didn’t need anything other than consistent care.

Eventually, she settled on telling him that there is no long-term solution for it, only management.

Silence pervaded the room, then he nodded. “Is that all?”

“Yeah, we’re done,” she said, having already taken samples from him, samples she won’t be able to study until they were back at the settlement. With clean bandages in hand, she went about rewrapping his lower leg. “So, how did it happen?”

“It just did,” Ging shrugged. “One day I started noticing the growths; I don’t know what the cause is, exactly.”

“If you had to guess.”

“Any number of animals or insects or plants here could’ve caused it,” he said. “I go everywhere, I try everything, and I’ve probably touched everything, too.”

“When did you first notice?”

“Last year, around the same time as now.”

“And you weren’t interacting with anything specific around that time?”

Ging looked at her. “If wandering ancient cursed archaeological sites can cause unnatural tissue growth, then sure.”

“Still wandering these?”

“Where else would I wander.” Ging said. “I’ve discovered some pretty neat things, nothing like the previous expeditions.”

Cheadle smiled. “You did?”

“I wasn’t sitting on my ass this whole time.”

“What new archaeological sites?”

The two of them gazed towards the door where Pariston stood, or a version of him that had stepped here from the past, suited and vested and ready to ruin something.

“Or you know what? Don’t tell me now,” he went on, coming inside the infirmary to look around, curious and in haste. “We’ll talk over dinner, or is it breakfast? I’m pretty sure we’re past twelve but there’s no way to tell.” He seized them with amused, listless eyes. “Are you hungry? I’m starving.”

When neither spoke, Pariston chuckled, his gaze traveling down to Ging’s leg on Cheadle’s lap, where her hands had stopped short of tying the bandages. “Oh, am I interrupting something?”

“Hardly,” Cheadle said, tying the knot tightly around Ging’s ankle, let him draw it back. “Now that you’re awake, maybe Ging will finally deign to tell us why we’re here.”

Ging hopped off the bed and started picking \up his clothes. “We’ll eat first, I’m hungry too. Aren’t you?” He looked at Cheadle, gone for a moment as he slinked back his t-shirt over his face.

“What’s there to eat?”

“Please let there be meat.” Pariston chimed in. “We haven’t had meat in a while.”

Ging pulled up his pants. “Yeah, but I don’t go out to hunt as much anymore, so if what I have here isn’t enough feel free to go out and hunt your own meat.”

“You know, the food in the settlement is awful.” Pariston said as they left the infirmary.

“You don’t trust the food there?”

“We don’t trust anything there.” Cheadle said. “They don’t even know why animals stopped appearing around the place.”

Ging led them through the third deck, this one more spacious than the one above, designed for leisure and activities. The map of the ship, hanging large at the entrance of every deck, showed a dance hall and a swimming pool area, a cinema theater and a restaurant, although it was harder to tell where these rooms were with the way Ging had upturned the whole deck, leaving the main hall completely empty. She wouldn’t be surprised if these maps were just red herring.

If Cheadle had to guess, he’d probably structured the place so that whomever found the ship and intruded wouldn’t find anything of particular value. If Ging hid anything important here, it’s going to be either sealed behind trapdoors or placed extremely in plain sight. A couple secret rooms wouldn’t be out of the ordinary, either.

There was something strange about the ship, too, not least of all a medicine cabinet filled with expired pills. Most meds usually expired after three years of production, but the ones in the infirmary had a remaining shelf-life of less than one by the time they were stocked in the ship. That might not be very strange if the cruise liner had a planned short journey with a set destination, but luxury nowhere voyages usually involved more meticulous stocking arrangements. Did this mean that the Dark Continent had always been the intended destination of this ship? Its sudden disappearance—and reappearance—was certainly peculiar.

Pariston and Ging were walking a little ahead, their twittering low and consistent, something about food, about the big chandelier in the main hall, about clothes, about the incessant rain outside. She wiped sweat off her forehead.

Was it possible that the Sea Cherry passengers were plagued with some similar disease to the one in the settlement? Did it crash in the ocean and then float to shore? Did it arrive safely and was then struck by some disaster? Did nothing of note happen? Did the passengers just collectively decide to leave the ship or did something occur, forcing them to leave? Could this incident pertain to her research? Something about what that Samion kid told Pariston rang in her head. Could the rogue group of his story and the passengers on this ship be one and the same?

This ship didn’t just crash, did it.

Cheadle held onto that thought as they entered the kitchen, a huge space of white walls and stainless steel, smelling slightly of something old and metallic, the only signs of human presence a bunch of dirty plates in a nearby sink. There was a kitchen like this on every deck, and each one had a backdoor to move stock around and a main one open to every eating area. Fridges lined the wall to their left, but Ging only pointed towards one large walk-in freezer.

“That’s where I keep all the food.”

Pariston took large steps to the freezer and with a strong pull dragged it open. A cloud of condensation wafted out, and he stood there, peering silently for a long moment into the insides of the freezer, something turning in his head.

He looked at them. “Let me cook.”

Ging lifted himself up a counter, his head hanging low, away from a cabinet that hung over it. “Do you know what’s in there?”

“No,” Pariston smiled. “You’ll walk me through the ingredients, won’t you?”

“I can just whip up something quick.”

Pariston frowned. “No, the three of us are together in the same place, alone, mind you, since forever, and I want to honor the occasion,” his eyes shifted from one to the other. “Don’t you feel that this is a special moment?”

The two of them only stared at him, impassive.

Last time the three of them _were_ together, alone in the same room, mind you, was the day the two entered her new office in the Association’s headquarters to hand her their resignation forms from the Zodiacs. Cheadle had an inkling that day, that she was never going to see them again under any sort of ordinary circumstances, and that thought had come true in more ways than one.

And she had not felt strange about this reunion until this very moment, perhaps precisely because they were all finally in the same room, not moving through spaces, about to cook and have dinner together, on a previously believed to be vanished ship, in land, in the Dark Continent.

Cheadle took a long breath.

It wasn’t just this moment. Even through all the political and economic turmoil and upheavals of the past decade, she still conceived of that life as largely an ordinary one, to someone like her and with her job, and now that conception was slowly coming apart, peeling little by little with such a mundane act as Pariston pulling out items from the freezer, a fledgling tower of sticks collapsing from within as he set everything on the counter and regarded them expectantly.

She now believed with strong conviction, as she watched Ging name one thing after the other, that she, personally, with these two or away from them—and even in the unlikely occasion that she returns to mainland, still chairman—was never going to live through any ordinary circumstances ever again.

Cheadle was a little right about this, and a little wrong, too, as always with her, but she didn’t ponder that for long.

“You said there’s alcohol?” She asked Ging, absentminded.

He took a break from telling Pariston the source of a slab of red meat to nod at her and point at what appeared to be a pantry door. “There’s some there, I don’t know if they’re any good though.”

“You never tried any?” She asked even though it wasn’t very strange. Ging was never much of a drinker.

“No, never felt like it.”

She rolled her eyes, left his side on the counter to check the wine pantry. “I would’ve drank myself to death if I were you.”

“Good thing you aren’t me then.”

Pariston smiled at her as she walked there, following her from the corner of his eye. “Pick a good one.”

Ignoring him, she opened the pantry door and stepped in, her shadow stretched before her long into the dark pantry, the only source of light the kitchen outside. It was warmer here, and she could make out the wooden shelves, more empty than stacked. So not only the medicine was taken, but wine, too. There was something slightly amusing, slightly morbid about this, more so because she would have probably done the same, taking with her the same things.

There weren’t many choices, and the ones that were available spurred only ambivalence, so Cheadle settled on picking one she’s never tried before, a red _Karah Nouh_ in a plain bottle, and she had to hold the bottle against the kitchen light to read the fine print. Apparently it was produced in a private Padukian winery.

Whatever.

“Oh, this one’s good!” Pariston said once she set the bottle down on the counter. “I’ve been to that winery myself once.”

“Nobody cares.”

“Do you mind cutting these vegetables then?”

“Fine.”

Cheadle reached for the nearest glasses she found and poured wine for all of them, then conked her butt down in the nearest chair, a bowl of weird Dark Continent veggies between her hands, absentmindedly accepting the knife Ging passed her. Pariston’s good mood irked her, as it always did, in its own special way, pointed and specific like nothing else.

Something about this moment reminded her of her last visit to Pariston’s villa, before she spirited him with her to this godforsaken land, around the table when he made her tea and served her his irritatingly good homemade cookies; everything there was happening inside a veil, the real reflection of events only difficultly glimpsed outside of a translucent barrier.

Impatiently, she peeled and sliced and chopped everything in the bowl. Cheadle wanted to move as soon as possible, to begin discussing tracking plans, the promptitude with which she left the settlement now dampened by the other two’s carefree meandering.

She glanced at them, their backs to each other, Pariston bent down in search of something under the sink, Ging standing with his hands in water, picking apart an oblong leafy plant. He caught her gaze, broke a leaf from the base of the plant and handed it to her, cold, dripping with water. “It’s like lettuce. Try it.”

“Where do these grow?” Cheadle accepted it with a cautious hand, twirled it between her fingers to inspect it. “Where do _all_ these vegetables grow?”

They were nothing like the ones in the settlement, which wasn’t entirely surprising. Different lands supported different crops, but edible plants were few in the continent, cultivated ones fewer.

“My grandpa’s farm.”

The piece of continental lettuce sat half-chewed in her mouth. Pariston, too, had stopped what he was doing to stare.

Ging resumed washing the vegetables, nonchalant about their reactions. “I tried to till a small farming land here a way south of the ship, but the soil didn’t support any crops. I still can’t figure when it works and when it doesn’t, there’s no pattern.” He said, still in his own little world. “I even stole some of the settlement crops but they didn’t take either, neither did Don’s.” He lifted up his face to gaze at them in turn. “I know it’s like this in the settlement too. Don says fertility here moves in four year cycles. Do you have any theories why?”

“Don Freecs?” Pariston asked, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. “You found him?”

Ging chewed through his own piece of lettuce. “It’s more like _he_ found _me_. I got distracted long enough for him to get bored and just come out.”

“Does he have anything to do with us being here?” Cheadle finally asked.

“Yes and no,” Ging said. “You came here because you need my help, right?” The water over his hands stopped. “I need your help, too.”

Cheadle put the vegetable bowl on the counter. “Well?”

“I’m excited to talk, but I wanna do it properly,” he said. “Besides, _you_ haven’t told me anything, and I believe that what we both want is interconnected.”

And just as he wanted, any relevant information on his part was delayed until the food was ready. So as he continued to describe all plants and meats to Pariston’s working hands, Cheadle began recounting everything, from their arrival to the continent to what they saw along the road here. There were little details she found irrelevant—too personal to mention—and the discomfort of deliberately omitting them came entirely from Pariston’s presence, silent but no doubt listening intently, reminding her that he’s been there for all of it, that whatever she chose to keep to herself didn’t solely belong to her but to them both, and yet he assisted her quietly, only nodding to affirm something here or there.

Gregory stood as an especially thorny subject amid all this, but Ging was resolute about hearing all of it. By the time they left the settlement, there was barely anything left of the scientist. No attempts at preservation worked. Her body shriveled and wasted and more than anything, her corpse came to resemble a rotten tree log. But that which was inside her continued to live—thrive, even. It grew a little bigger, still a shapeless mass of sentient flesh, she told Ging, and was right now under the watchful gaze of Hima, who was observing the creature and documenting its growth and habits and studying the samples collected from it.

“So you still don’t know what’s causing it?” Ging asked, opening a large jar of some spice. There was no incrimination in his question, but she felt guilty nevertheless.

Throughout history, doctors and medical practitioners observed, studied, and at times even healed various illnesses without ever knowing what pathogens caused them, or how. Moreover, she was careful about definitively labeling the cause of the illness in the settlement a ‘virus’. She had no proof, and the samples from the sick that she’d collected only revealed damage but not the agent behind it. Viruses were difficult to culture, and she needed living cells, and lots of luck, to catch one, keep it alive, and make it reproduce. Even then, there were no guarantees of successfully devising a cure.

“I need to gather more data,” she said, helping them by pulling plates and bowls out of a high cabinet. “We have to capture animals in the region not only to take samples but for experiments, too. There’s also—” and here she stopped, because her main proposition was contingent on a loose string of associations she drew between several things, and she didn’t know where and how to begin explaining them, chasing a hunch that might very well lead to nothing and waste time. “Let’s just say I’m hunting a particular semi-aquatic fungus I believe might be connected to the infection, and I want your help in finding it, along with everything else.”

It wasn’t just something connected to the infection, but a thing that has to do with the whole settlement, a homegrown, gradual affliction that might turn out to be completely absent from the natural world around the premises, perhaps, even, if samples proved it, a thing that has spilled from the settlement outward.

Ging, mostly in silence, standing over a boiling, steamy pot of stew, absorbed everything he heard, perhaps a bit of light finally shining on some obscure parts of his own story. At one point she stood up to take on the task of constant stirring from him, and they both stood over the pot, staring down at its swirling contents, lost in thought.

Dipping the wooden spoon in the pot, Cheadle lifted it up, gently blew air on it, then stretched it towards him. “Taste it.”

He leaned closer and opened his mouth, and she chuckled when he threw his head back, willing cold air into his mouth as food sat there, steaming hot.

“You still make a good stew?” She deliberately phrased it as a question.

Ging nodded with a pained expression, finally swallowing all of it, sniffing, tiny tears at the corners of his eyes. “You didn’t have to shove it in my mouth like that.”

She hummed, returning contentedly to the stirring. “You seemed a little too eager.”

“Because I still make a damn good stew, dammit. Give it here,” scowling, he snatched the spoon from her hand with some force, wrenching her stubborn fingers off it. She resisted but only playfully. He grabbed her hand and pushed it away.

This perked up the attention of Pariston across the aisle, until this point completely and silently immersed in doting over a piece of steak in an oversized pan, his whole being devoted to grilling it to perfection.

“Is that true?” He asked, turning around to regard them with a curious expression. “What’s the story here?”

Ging’s scowl deepened. “There’s no story, other than Cheadle meddling in my business like she always does.”

Cheadle stared at him, offended. “Meddle in your business? You’re the one who _leeched_ off my mission, remember?” She said with a bemused smile. “I had something interesting going on, you were accidently ‘passing by’, on an isolated island no less, then you decided all of a sudden to stick around when you were supposed to leave.”

“You _asked_ me to stay in your I-didn’t-ask kind of way,” Ging countered. “While you were busy looking down your nose at people there, _I_ knew the local language and you were fumbling like an idiot among the populace, having doors closed in your face, before I came and saved your ass further embarrassment.”

 _And saved your life_ , but he didn’t say it, and wasn’t going to say it, although Cheadle’s own apparent reticence regarding the subject made him more excited to recount events.

Through this, Pariston was still listening, regarding them intently, his question yet unanswered.

“So you see, we’re inspecting a bunch of plants up a hill, total boring shit,” Ging continued, deciding to retell it, waving the spoon over their head, ignoring Cheadle’s weak protests. “And then a couple kids suddenly fall into a river below us, a badly constructed bridge just collapses,” he said, sticking the spoon back in the pot to stir it some more. “So Cheadle, remarkably idiotic in her bravery, just drops everything to run and save them, without taking time to study the situation,” then he laughed, amused and admiring all the same. “She managed to get those boys out, but got stuck in debris and swallowed so much water I had to jump in after her,” his eyes sought her, but she was looking away, letting him have control over the narrative, waiting for him to just embarrass her. “Because of her noble and gracious deed, the boys’ family invite us into their home, agree to talk to us, and we finally have a breakthrough with the mission.”

That was the meat of the story, anyway.

“And you cooked at their home?” Pariston asked.

“Yep, for the whole family.” Ging nodded, turning off the fire under the pot. “It’s ready.”

He ended the story there, on a quite anticlimactic note, opting to leave behind little details that had no bearing on the mission, the details he was aware were the real source of Cheadle’s embarrassment. Was she upset that he shared this story, or parts of it, with Pariston? Even after he was done, she remained silent, didn’t utter any defenses, and then promptly busied herself with setting up their dinner.

There were parts of it that were way more embarrassing to Ging himself than her, and he had omitted those too, while Pariston himself seemed more excited and satisfied in knowing that he wasn’t privy to all of it, that there were more to dig up in this muddy ditch.

Slowly, their little feast came together. Pariston insisted on using a dining table and all, maybe candles and napkins if there were any (there were), and Ging obliged him. The ship contained numerous objects that he had simply never used, or never cared to use. Entire rooms were filled from floor to ceiling with what he considered junk, maybe useful for later, but of no interest to him at the moment, and now he found himself opening all these doors in search of things he’d left to collect dust, objects that never really belonged to anyone, commodities bought to furnish the ship, replaceable and disposable, and some others that were clearly personal, some he wondered what their owners thought when they left them behind, how willing or unwilling they were to move forward without them.

What things had to be abandoned, what more didn’t make the journey, now all confined to the alien geometries he’s made of this ship.

There was one room which he used to store all the musical instruments, none of which was kind to him. Ging appreciated music but had no particular musical taste, was tone deaf, and couldn’t play an instrument to save his life. He tried. He tried all of them, from string instruments to percussions (which seemed deceptively easier than the others. Wrong.) He tried because, for a while, he seemed to have all the time in the world, and nothing of what he wanted originally was working out for him. He could neither find new, relevant artifacts or sites nor decipher the ones he’d already discovered.

His purpose in limbo, Ging picked up a side hobby.

Now behind him stood Pariston, peering into the newly-opened room with bubbling curiosity. “There’s a piano,” he said it in almost a whisper, his voice underlined by an old reverence.

Ging turned to him. “You play?”

“Yeah!” Pariston smiled. “Does it work?”

“How should I know, try it.”

More than happy to oblige, Pariston entered the stuffy room, trekking his way with careful, small steps between dusty flight cases, making his way to the black piano at the other end of the room. “That's a good Baby Grand.” He said, sweeping his hand over the dusty black surface of the piano. “We used to have this beautiful caramel-colored upright at home. It’s on that piano that I learned how to play.”

Pariston lifted the fallboard, pressed a couple keys, tilted his ear down as if to better discern the quality of the sound produced, then pressed some others, segueing into a short musical phrase.

Even though Ging didn’t know shit about pianos, he knew it just didn’t sound right.

Pariston laughed, then offered Ging a sheepish smile. “The strings have suffered some.” He said, looking down at the rows of strings. “Oh well.”

“What terrible sound was that?” Cheadle appeared beside Ging, hands weighed by a tray of utensils and silverware. She looked around, her eyes finally landing on Pariston inside, who had stood up, hunched over the piano, slightly disappointed. “Are we going to eat?” Cheadle’s wrist watch showed it was past twelve in the morning. “If this dinner is going to take any longer than this we might as well just raid the fridge.”

Time was moving slow for her, but to Ging it was flying by. He barely sensed its passing since they’d arrived, the way they reappeared, the way they casually re-entered his life, and this coming and going of people wasn’t unusual for him. The pressing but fleeting nature of human encounters was the backbone of life as a Hunter; nobody ever stayed for long, friends and acquaintances and enemies alike came and went, passed and left, and Ging liked this. One of many in constant movement, he never thought much about it, about time passing, in spite of the fact that his closest relationship—debatably—throughout the past years being with someone defined almost entirely by the length of time he’d spent alive. Except he was never alone for such a long period of time before, the ship a place Don had never once set foot on, disinterested in the goings-on of Ging’s life away from him, the ship a place, a structure, Ging thought of as more a project than a home. A project to pass the time.

Now those two were here, arguing about the ‘impossibility of truly tuning a piano’ and that catgut strings ‘are not actually made from cat guts’, not venturing far but somehow occupying this place, and for the first time since he sensed the intrusion in his _En\_ , before he even saw them, Ging was entirely glad for their presence.

Finally, around a long table of red oak, the three sat, high on well-cushioned chairs with wooden frames carved into elaborate, reticulated leaves, their faces lit by long, honey-colored candles placed in ornate candelabras, triangular flames flickering and forking and finally settling into a gentle sway as they all got ready to begin dinner.

“Do you like it, Cheadle?” Pariston asked, filling their plates with food, animated by the patience of a man who had all the time in the world.

He filled their long-stemmed glasses with another wine Cheadle had chosen, placed the plates in front of them, and then took his place opposite Cheadle at the other head of the table, chin resting on the back of his entwined fingers, the shadows cast on his face making the left corner of his mouth appear a little too big.

“Very gothic.” She answered, finally, her napkin a triangle on her lap, the forks and knives and spoons laid out before her on the table in an arrangement different from the one Pariston had laid out first. She just forced a smile at the questioning tilt of his head. “Cultural differences.”

Ging observed her fumble for a moment, elbows on the table then off it, hands down at her lap then tinkering once again with the arrangement of the silverware, possibly being chastised by a voice in her head.

“I’d like to raise a toast,” Pariston started, his wine a bloody dark orange in the candle light, the brown of his eyes twinkling warmly in the glow of the dinner table. “Here’s to the Dark Continent, for bringing all three of us back in one place,” he started, smiling. “and to our first dinner together, may there be many more.”

Cheadle rolled her eyes but raised her glass anyway. Ging did the same.

The wine tasted like distilled copper. He could get used to it.

With elbows on the table, he leaned forward, addressing them each with a long gaze. “So, guess it’s time for me to talk. You want the short story or the long one?”

Pariston unfolded his napkin with a swift move. “What’s the more interesting one?”

Ging smirked. “The one where I’m planning a journey to meet my mysterious ancestors down the center of the Earth? Or maybe it’s the one where I discovered a series of new, hidden and possibly interconnected temples all over the south and southwest of the continent?”

And he could have phrased either differently, but enjoyed their staring, contemplative, blinking faces. They weren’t shocked—they knew more than to be shocked—but cautiously curious. Even, on Cheadle’s part, slightly dismissive.

“Mysterious ancestors, you say?” She mumbled. “Any hard, biological proof?”

“Not on me there isn’t,” Ging said, unthreatened by her doubt. “Does it matter?”

“Well, you specified ancestors, didn’t you?”

Ging stuck a fork in his meat, enjoying the way it split in soft tendrils. “I admit it’s more speculative guessing than concrete science, so far, but hasn’t it been proven that the continent was once inhabited by various civilizations?” He asked rhetorically. “I have archaeological findings—not conclusive, I’ll give you that—which may prove that a connection between the Kujira Archipelago and the extinct people of the southwestern region exists.”

He hoped this made the connection between his two endeavors clear.

“And you need my help because?” Cheadle asked, taking a sip from her wine, turning it in her mouth, biting the inside of her cheeks. Pupils dark and big, her irises took on a murky blue in the candle light.

“Because some of the inscriptions on the temples’ ruins alludes to an ancient illness that I believe is similar to what’s happening in the settlement right now.”

That got her full attention. Eyes a little wider, she sat up straighter, but he quickly dampened it.

“But,” he started. “Due to the designs of the totems, the inscriptions could be read in multiple ways, some contradicting this theory. To be completely honest, I didn’t think much of the disease theory until recent events brought it to the forefront of my mind; I was more interested in the linguistic and storytelling structure of the inscriptions, the way those people wrote in verse and riddles, how each one lead to the other, like it’s a treasure trail.”

“So what is it you’re pursuing now?” Pariston asked, stretching his arm towards a bowl of salad at the center of the table. He didn’t reach it, so Ging passed it to him.

“Nothing.” Then he clarified. “Nothing _now_. I’m a little stuck, so I’m doing other things,” he shrugged. “Call it a creative block.”

And he wasn’t lying about that creative block. At one point his mind simply stopped clearly processing anything to do with archaeological work, a sudden inexplicable blackout in that corner of his brain. The longer he looked at all the papers he’s collected, all the dots he’s attempted to connect, all the ruins and ornate puzzles, the less any of it made sense.

It all started with a simple poetic verse, resisting reasonable interpretation, leaving him obsessed but befuddled for months, and snowballed from there. Even things he was near certain about became once again obscure and unreadable, demanding he look over them again and again.

He hasn’t given up. Hell no. He just needed a kind of repose, an intermittent period to rest and recharge, a side project, or two, or several, except the ship side project—picked up completely on a whim and fancy—had taken years out of his original research.

Year after year, Ging lost the members of his team. One by one they were gone, swallowed in whole or part. Initially the loss was of a conventional sort: attacked by predators, or trapped by raiders, or falling victim to poisonous plants. Then the world around them became an odder, more sinister place—an idea that he’s resisted for long and still did. The continent didn’t become any more unwelcoming and hostile than it was before, it’s only his inability to parse the true fates of his teammates that made it seem so. Some of them had vanished gradually, experiencing a degradation of mind and body before any physical disappearance, bedridden for months, he had watched them die slowly. Others—still sane and fit and hopeful—gone completely in the dead of night.

At the end, only his brain was left processing all the research they’ve done, and after a while, something in there had just called it a day and refused to cooperate, resisting the urgency he felt to achieve something, anything, to reach a breakthrough, to make the death and sacrifices and losses and effort of team members worth something.

Working alone, being alone, everything mattered too much and didn’t matter at all.

Still, he didn’t despair, mostly because he was never prone to it. He recognized, too, that bringing in other fields to his work always helped. After all, archaeology had a whole branch dedicated to the study of ancient diseases as documented and displayed in the remains of those who experienced them.

Ging had dipped his feet before in paleopathology, but he was far from an expert. Cheadle too probably had her runs in the field, but her work mainly concerned living organisms. Either way, one of the Dark Continent’s biggest and longest-standing mysteries stood as a sizable hurdle against any serious paleopathology research or field work, and when he gazed at Cheadle he saw the same concern in her eyes.

There were simply no human skeletal remains of any kind. None belonging to the ancient, native populations, anyway, and not in any of the regions he’d combed.

“Any chance you found a cemetery?” She asked with a wry smile.

Ging shook his head. “Does that make you less excited to go along with my theory?”

“No,” she stretched her glass outward so Pariston could refill it. “I just want to move as quickly as possible.”

Knowing her, she most likely came here with a whole timeline in mind that was probably already failing her, cracking when she most needed it to hold together.

“We can dig for skeletons and fossil dung all you want,” she continued. “But I must begin my field work fast, and it will take precedence.”

“Sure, I can accept that,” Ging smiled. “We won’t waste each other’s time.”

“Good.”

Her eyes sought Pariston, characteristically silent whenever it came to matters he was no expert in. On the fringes of their fields, he was acquainted with the literature but not the technical work.

“What will you be doing?” Cheadle asked him.

Pariston smiled as if caught off guard, as if he never once thought of himself or his presence as anomalous or strange or unnecessary.

“I will be doing whatever you ask me to do,” he answered. “Just like I’ve been doing since we came here, right?”

“Right.”

Deliberately she avoided looking at Ging, and in a way he avoided gazing at her for long, too.

No discussion about Pariston and his presence was ever going to happen with Pariston in the same room, and he knew just as well that sooner rather than later she was going to fire up another round of questions at him regarding the subject. After all, Pariston was here because _he_ had asked for Pariston to be here. Ging dreaded that moment, and not just because he believed only Pariston could succinctly put into words what he actually wanted, if the man himself even knew it.

_“You haven’t forgotten me.”_

In a little less than a decade, that was the first thing he heard Pariston say. In that dingy room in the settlement, he had quietly opened the door, visibly pained and weary, then came to a stop when he found Ging sitting on the edge of the bed. An imperceptible eyebrow arch, like he was already expecting Ging to show up at any moment. A ready, tired smile appeared on his face then. He didn’t ask Ging anything, where he was, how he entered, how he found the room, how long he’s been there—he just walked closer and sat next to Ging on the bed, letting out a long sigh, his wiry fingers pooling in his lap.

 _You haven’t forgotten me,_ he said it with the voice of a man who’s still only recently acquainting himself with freedom. Marginal and controlled but a freedom he was willing to accept temporarily.

Ging could have said, then, that he _had_ forgotten Pariston, for a while at least, in the muck and grind of daily survival in a hostile land, but that wouldn’t have mattered and would’ve probably annoyed the other man, so instead he reminded Pariston of their last conversation.

He had made a promise, he said as much. Pariston nodded, and then they fell into silence, sitting beside each other on the bed, staring out the window at the murky sky. Ging offered his invitation for them, but Pariston had something else in mind.

It was simultaneously sudden and expected, Pariston’s hand sliding under his shirt, over his thigh, his face inching closer, his breath held behind tight lips, and Ging knew it was a bad idea almost instantly but went with it anyway, an old kind of desire rekindled in him, a latent desire he had to later admit, alone in the ship after leaving the settlement, wasn’t found anew or rediscovered at the moment but been building up since he learned of their arrival.

And it was strange, to be this close to someone else again—to be this close to Pariston, specifically, again—and he felt a little out of it as it was happening, wanting it and not wanting it, less strange his suspicions—confirmed soon after—that Pariston mostly had Cheadle in mind, not Ging, when he initiated the whole thing. Perhaps that little factoid ought to have irritated him, but it didn’t. He didn’t get a whole blowjob due to that little mind game, but he hadn’t gone there seeking or expecting one, and he couldn’t always be concerned with how Cheadle reacted or decided to blame him for every little thing Pariston did, but seeing her face so suddenly in the doorway, the way her laughter rang in his ears, the way her eyes took them all in and then seemed to blink them both out of existence in the span of a second, it all made him realize this wasn’t the way he wanted to meet them again, yet it seemed like such a fitting, sufficient reunion for them, three people who were never easy with one another.

Perhaps, even, and in a roundabout way, it had made things smoother.

Cheadle, he suspected, was somewhat wrong in her interpretation of Pariston’s intent, if what Ging sensed from the latter said anything. Pariston didn’t want to make Cheadle feel unimportant and left out, but to annoy her enough to make her jump out of her comfort zone and into his. He was baiting her.

If Ging told Cheadle that Pariston was mainly here to have fun she would probably bite his nose off.

Even at their worst, he could always handle either of them alone. Cheadle, especially, was a more pleasant person when her sworn nemesis wasn’t around, but whenever they were in the same room the air itself smelled differently, and throughout all their various conflicts, from the silliest to the most serious, he never believed there was ever more bad blood between them than now.

The negative energy overflowing from both ends of the table made him want to retreat in his chair; it was never wise to stick one’s nose in what amounted to a complicated, career-spanning conflict of interest, let alone enter it with two powerful, emotional basket cases. Yet willfully or not, Ging almost always found himself in the midst of these two, one way or another.

For now, however, he was content to simply be curious about them, alone and together. Their bodies and faces were still guarded and antsy, and there was still much they didn’t reveal, but Ging didn’t mind that.

They spent the dinner in amicable conversation, all of it having little to do with the continent. Cheadle talked at length about the state of the world outside, the shifts in global power relations, the brewing anti-monarchist movement in Kakin, the Hunters working there to investigate, the civil war in Trafalovia and the attempt to enforce a conditional neutrality law upon the Association.

A month was a lifetime, a lifetime absolutely nothing. More wine on the table, more politics, more anecdotes about people he hasn’t seen in years.

**III**

Once again in the kitchen, time rolled on silently, only the sound of water on dishes and cups streaming around them, and when that stopped they could hear the hum of rain outside.

Despite the food and alcohol, none of them was sleepy. Each stood over a task or another, and after an hour or two, the kitchen returned to a time before they stepped in it, perhaps even cleaner. The table and chairs remained.

They worked in companionable silence, and Ging had left a big kettle to brew slowly over the stove so that by the time they finished working the hot drink he prepared was ready.

“Will it cure our hangovers tomorrow morning?” Cheadle asked, taking the steamy cup from Ging.

“No, but you won’t feel as groggy now.” He answered, sitting on the carpet of his room next to them.

Ging’s room wasn’t a suite but one of the more modest balcony cabins on the ship. He liked it because it was the highest one and only called it his room to simplify directions. None of the rooms on the ship were his, and he rarely inhabited any one of them for long during the day. Sparingly decorated and furnished, he liked the timber walls and the small bed and the little nook and the way the moon climbed up the nightly tunnel between two trees when it was full.

A map unfolded between them, they discussed their journey plans well into the night, and Cheadle insisted, despite the rain and the possibility that it might not stop tomorrow, to start moving with the next sunrise.

While Ging built up a mental inventory of all that they’ll have to carry with them, Cheadle retreated up to the nook with her MP3 player, and Pariston settled for a while into contented silence, lying on the ground with cheek resting on hand, putting down the cup of tea Ging handed him beside the book he was reading, an absent-minded ‘thank you’ leaving his mouth in a murmur.

“Mandango?” Ging arched an eyebrow, regarding the cover of Pariston’s book curiously. “Now that’s a relic.”

Not minding the interruption much, Pariston lifted his gaze from the paper to Ging. “You’ve read it?”

“Yeah, the whole series.”

Pariston smiled. “Even the really terrible ones?”

“Aha, everything,” Ging said. “When I was eleven.”

Pariston laughed, hardly embarrassed. “The good ones are still very readable. I think it’s written much more intelligently than people give it credit for.” And that was directed more at Cheadle than Ging, which she duly took note of.

“It’s pulpy and puerile,” she said with a judgmental side-eye. “Besides, the female characters are terribly written.”

“Right,” Pariston said. “You like your female characters homicidal.”

“I like them complicated.”

“Nobody’s complicated in these books,” Pariston argued back, letting his hand slip to the floor when Ging dragged the book from under his hand.

Cheadle rolled her eyes. “Isn’t that even more of an indictment against these novels?”

“They’re for children.”

“And you’re pushing forty, Pariston.”

Then she seemed, suddenly and without warning, greatly upset at that fact. They were all so old it made her want to punch a wall, but was being younger any better? Cheadle’s adolescence was almost uniformly terrible, a long series of trauma and losses and repression and rejection, and how she’s managed to make anything of it at all was a mystery. Her twenties in contrast were immeasurably better; transitioning and graduation and finding a purpose and a foothold in the world made life a little less alienating. And still, the place where she read these books wasn’t a place she could ever return to. It wasn’t a place that would ever take her back.

She’s read Mandango. Of course she’s read it. Every eighties kid on the planet read it. She read it despite the disapproval of her parents, because it wasn’t ‘serious literature’, and contained ‘immoral themes’, and teenagers fooled around and kissed in it—all very terrible, damaging things for a ‘young, impressionable mind’. They had attempted to persuade her away from this series of novels not knowing she was sneaking into the school library to read worse things. In shame, of course—everything she’s done back then was in shame—but hungry and horny and questioning the appropriate desires she was supposed to have, questioning the very body she lived with.

On the carpet, Pariston was having somewhat similar feelings, an age-related existential angst. He _was_ pushing forty, against every fiber of his will, against the eminent desires of his whole being. He never wanted to grow old, but mostly, he didn’t want to _look_ old. When he was fifteen none of this would’ve mattered, because the world is eternal at fifteen.

One day you’re fifteen and suddenly you’re pushing forty, in a ship away from civilization. He remembered that his childhood home was often full of old people, all of whom repulsed him greatly, and he had to call them aunts and uncles and grandmas and grandpas even though none of them were actually that. Pariston’s own father was very old, always old. Was he going to become that?

“I’m actually 38.” He protested, knowing full well it made him look silly, but she didn’t hear him, the music from her earbuds reaching his own ears. She drew her knees up to her chest and curled, staring out the window.

Inside the book, one at page 15 and the other at 70, Ging found a tender leaf, still vibrant green and glistening, and a pressed gardenia flower, less alive but no less fragrant. He returned the book to Pariston, didn’t ask him about the flora bookmarks.

He walked to his bed to lie down. Despite having given them their own rooms, Ging suspected the other two were going to sleep right here, Cheadle’s eyes already fluttering shut, Pariston taking longer to flip a page.

Under his bed he had pushed the box he’d received earlier, inside it still the things he didn’t touch or open. He stared long at the white ceiling, his body growing heavier.

Last time Ging was on mainland, he stood under the snow in Swaldani beside a café, waiting for Gon.

Behind the glass front of the café people were setting up Christmas decorations, hauling a massive neon sign through the front door, struggling to hang it up in the perfect place on the brick wall, their voices intermingled and distant, and a Christmas tree, squished behind glass, peered down at him, heavy with ornamented red globes and vaguely-religious knickknacks and icicle lights and tiny angels and scented letters.

At the end, Gon didn’t come.

His body bathed in the warm glow emanating from behind glass, his breathing visible, people moving around him on the sidewalk, across the street, Ging stood still, felt the world stand still, too, and remained there just to see the Christmas tree light up. Then he left.

**III**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One of the things I always wanted to explore is nen as a healing tool/method, its consequences on the body, and how difficult medical nen actually is. It seems nen-users can't heal themselves using basic aura techniques, even when they're advanced users utilizing multiple affinities (e.g. Morel, who ends up in a hospital post CA arc); a healing factor has to exist *within* a Hatsu, such as Kurapika's cross chain, Bisky's masseuse, and Pitou's Doctor Blythe. Nen healing is uncommon and people who can do it well, let alone professionally, aren't many. That shit takes time to learn, and it's just fun to give mighty Ging Freecs this one serious weakness.


	9. Back and Forth with Light

Wet leaves pressed under their feet, Cheadle felt the chill of dawn creep into her bones.

The world was green and blue and gray, their bodies hazy in the misty, muddy marshes of the mountain forest. Ging walked ahead, and Pariston trailed behind her, their footsteps the clearest sound in the echo chamber among the trees. Strapped to her back a tranquilizer gun, a mist net and its appendages, her leather roll of drugs and tools and vials, Cheadle marched in the middle.

She had woken up from a restless sleep with a blanket over her and her glasses on the nightstand, her neck and back bent in an uncomfortable position in the nook where she’d fallen asleep. She didn’t know who slept last to turn the lights off or cover her, but when she opened her eyes Pariston was on the bed and Ging was nowhere to be seen. Her MP3 player, too, wasn’t on her.

Pariston opened his eyes when she picked up her glasses, and they just stared at each other for a moment, the room still dark, the waves of mist outside casting a murky white light onto his face. She could tell he hadn’t slept very well either. They both drank too much wine, perhaps, and for a moment he seemed reluctant to get up, instead reaching with weltering, numb fingers for her left forearm, his eyelids fluttering, and just held it, saying nothing, seemingly about to fall asleep again just for a second while her arm anchored him to consciousness.

Her arm was cold and his fingers were so warm, wrapped around her skin, holding her in a sleepy grip.

“My head hurts.” He murmured into the pillow.

The room was so chilly it was tempting to slip under the blanket beside him, like he’d probably slipped beside Ging during the night.

Gently, perhaps because Cheadle herself was still barely awake, she removed his hand off her, one finger at a time, and left him alone in the room.

“Don’t fall back asleep,” she said outside, slipping on a big coat she found hanging in the hallway. “We won’t wait for you.”

Still in the grandeur of a comprehensible landscape, still surrounded by familiar plants and the hiss and chirr and hum of lurking wildlife, they were all nonetheless so small, all silent, each of them in their own little world. Draped from head to toes in rags, Ging threw them a look behind his shoulder every once in a while. He appeared like a pilgrim ghost.

It was strange to exit the room and suddenly remember that most of the ship was askew. It was the worst angle to handle in the early morning after multiple consecutive nights of terrible sleep, and her feet slipped under her, gliding and skipping without much thought down the tilted floors.

The rain outside had stopped, momentarily, letting the scents and sounds of the forest come into focus, sharpening around them, the moist wood, the slippery mud, tapping, pecking, rustling, gulping, the summer in tender bloom, a pond of crystal clear water surrounded by poison.

They ought to set camp soon, and Ging promised a perfect spot ahead from which they could begin operating. They needed a safe place to unload their equipment and preserve samples. Being only three people, one of them nenless, moving slower was an inevitability. Splitting was out of the question. Keeping samples on them as they collected more a risky idea.

In the cold light of dawn, she had found all equipment ready at the staircase to the first deck. Like a dream, the fog lulled over the stairs, obscuring the world outside the ship, and she felt herself inside a crystal ball. So close, one can never see their fortunes.

Wrapping the coat tightly around herself, toes cold in her socks, she walked away from the crooked staircase, knowing she was within the parameters of Ging’s _En_ , and if she focused even a little she could sense the quiet pulse of his nen signature, somewhere deep within the ship. She didn’t seek him.

Slowly, the sun was beginning to take shape overhead. If the map was correct and Ging’s time estimations precise, they will arrive around evening at Lake Harkenburg, so named after the prince who had ‘discovered’ it, a large body of water in a natural volcanic depression. Not just a lake but abandoned settlements too. Humans had once occupied this region, for a fleeting moment in the age of the universe, for a blink of time.

Cheadle wasted no time in starting to gather data. Far away from the dangerous heartlands of the continent where the biggest creatures lived and thrived, here were smaller but no less vicious animals and insects. Besides the fungi she wanted to have, she particularly cared for birds and bugs, aquatic or prone to live near water, the most likely vectors, she believed, for the settlement disease—small creatures that can travel far without being too conspicuous, can simply carry or be reservoirs for a pathogen that has found its way to premises suspiciously devoid of wildlife. She hasn’t forgotten the insect that had landed on her arm the very first day of their arrival. She hasn’t seen anything like it again.

Pariston carried the nitrogen freezer tank, a deceptively small rectangle-shaped box that might pass for a wandering painter’s kit. Like a magical, bottomless pouch, it could be opened and unfolded, revealing dozens of terraced, isolated, marked compartments, lined with protective nitrile inside out; a nen construct. He followed her with it, opening its cold core to place the samples inside.

If anything at all was to indicate the degree of their auras' entanglement, him carrying a conjured object made of her nen without incurring any damage on himself was it.

Dwarfed by the world around him, Cheadle observed him curiously, stepping into her zone, out of it, moving quicker, lagging behind, gazing at his surroundings with a serene kind of wonder, in a scouting outfit and boots that made him somehow look a little shorter, he appeared strangely human to her, like he did that morning only a couple hours ago, with his fingers around her arm.

His eyes caught her glancing at him and he smiled. She didn't have time to turn around. "Need anything?"

"No." She said. _Does your head still hurt?_ She was about to ask, but she didn't. Instead, she pointed up to something over his head. "Look."

Pariston did, and she watched his initial questioning smile grow wider. "Aren't those yellow-tailed bats?"

Ging had stopped too and was looking up at the roosting site of about five thousand sleeping bats. He took off his hat and for the first time since moving they all huddled close together to listen to this bat tribe snore in unison.

Feeding on the fruits of the maka trees, they inhabited the highest branches and nooks and cavities, farthest away from direct sunlight, and once asleep they all dangled down in a heavy, crisscrossed laundry line, cocooning themselves inside their wings, the span of which could exceed six feet in fully-developed adults.

Cheadle considered taking samples from them too, but not only were they so high, but they also weren’t a species she implicated in her research. The settlement vicinity provided neither ample roosting sites nor the sweet fruit they love. Besides, the diseases they carried were some of the first to be studied, and none of them resembled what she was currently dealing with.

Ging regarded her for a moment. "You want samples from them?"

She shook her head. They had to be judicious about using their resources and storage space. She couldn’t even hope to capture a bit of every animal they passed. Bats especially were a rowdy bunch that didn’t take kindly to being disturbed out of sleep, and the process of their capture was long and required prior groundwork. The mission must remain focused. This surely wasn’t going to be their last trip.

"Maybe on the way back."

The three remained standing under the bat brood for a while, the world waking up one animal at a time around them.

"They'll shit in our mouths if we keep staring up like this." Ging said, loosening up a bit since they left the ship. She wondered what was on his mind.

When she found him, Ging was wandering the kitchen with her earphones in his ears, her MP3 player no doubt at the other end, shoved at the bottom of the impossibly deep pockets of his pants. Cheadle dreaded what he might be listening to. The guilty pleasures in that small device far outnumbered what the critics agree to be 'good music'. There were podcasts and audiobooks too, but the distant rhythm and beat she could hear told her he's listening to some song. She hoped it wasn’t one of the raunchier songs in her playlists.

Silently they waved at each other, she at the door, he crouched before an open pantry, gathering food items in a bag blobbed with its mouth gaping open beside him.

"Good morning." She said, and he didn’t hear her but read her lips.

"Hey,"

"Want coffee?"

He stopped working to gaze up at her. "I thought I smelled it."

Cheadle smiled, showing him a homely tin cylinder she'd taken out of her bag. "I brought a good supply with me," she said, stepping into the kitchen. "I'm not staying here for months just to sustain my brain cells on maka sap or whatever."

"That shit's gross." Ging said, standing up, taking the earbuds off.

She chuckled. "I know. Aren’t you cold?"

In a sleeveless tank top, Ging searched around the kitchen for a coffee-appropriate pot to boil water in. "A little. I'm fine."

His bare arms extended over his head, sifting through sparsely stocked cupboards, scarred and scratched and pecked at a dozen different places but still as strong as she remembered them, still tough and toned. It made the state of his left leg a little more bothersome.

Goosebumps on his arms as he stood over the stove where he placed a pot full of water, Cheadle walked to his side and draped the left side of the coat over him, and it was big enough to cover them both and then some.

“It will catch fire like this.” Ging said, lighting the stove top.

“You’d deserve it for stealing my MP3 player.” She stood beside him, putting down the coffee can on the counter, waiting for the water to be ready, her shoulder brushing his.

He gave her a look. “It’s called borrowing.”

“Borrowing something requires prior permission.”

“Sure,” he took out the MP3 player, grabbed her hand and put the device in her open palm, the earphones still around his neck, his hand under hers. “Cheadle, can I borrow your MP3 player?”

“…Yeah, you can.”

He snatched it back. “See? I didn’t ask because you would’ve given it to me and I would’ve woke you up for nothing.”

She shook her head, amused. “You have a very long history of ‘borrowing’ my stuff and then never returning them.”

“Just name _one_ thing I borrowed and never returned.”

Cheadle laughed. “That’s easy. Several books, one of which you borrowed the _very first time_ we met each other, mind you. The Woodlot of Humanity, remember? And there’s that other very large medical textbook you wanted to ‘read quickly’ and then probably never did.”

“Hey, I did read it.”

“My point stands.” She chuckled. “You stole a bag once that promptly disappeared, and you even stole a new pair of boots.”

Ging laughed. “It’s not my fault you and I have the same shoe size.”

She nudged him with her shoulder. “You were like ‘these are some neat boots! Can I try them?’ and I said ‘sure, you can try them’, and then, and then,” she laughed, grappling with his hands as he tried to cover her mouth and stop her from talking. “and then, you left, _still_ wearing them, only to return six months later wearing _another_ pair of boots,” she managed to keep his hands in place, holding them tightly with her own. “and when I asked you where my boots were, you said ‘what boots’?”

“Someone I met needed them more than me, so I exchanged them with him for something I wanted.”

“Oh, you and your kind, opportunistic heart.”

The water came to a boil between them, but neither moved to grab the coffee tin can on the counter, standing face to face, close, under the heavy shroud of the coat, hands entangled between them.

Cheadle let go.

“What are you even listening to?” She asked, turning away from him to pick up the coffee can.

He smirked, grabbing a spoon. "Some really filthy songs."

Cheadle didn’t know whether to be comforted or embarrassed by his conspiratorial, shit-eating grin.

"Like some seriously raunchy shit," he snickered, but something told her he too was a little shy about poking at it, so he just busied himself with dropping spoonfuls of coffee into the water. "Do you sleep listening to this?"

He turned the stove fire down, then fished the MP3 player out of his pocket, seemed to rewind a song, then split the earbuds between them.

One techno rap verse about enthusiastically sucking dick behind the convenience store later, interspersed with suspicious moaning noises as a background sample—to which they both listened silently and reverently—Ging retrieved the earbud from her.

Cheadle burst out laughing, felt blood rise to her cheeks. He just had to pick the stupidest song of them all, didn’t he. She inched closer to him, gave him a cheeky look. "So what if I fall asleep listening to these kinds of songs?"

"Nothing," he mumbled, playfully pushing her back with his arm against her chest to make space for himself over the stove. "I don’t care what you listen to."

His bicep against her breasts, his arm lingered there a little too long before pulling back. A tiny jolt of awkwardness made her want to step back, to reassess this proximity, but she didn’t. Instead she moved even closer to him, behind him as he made their coffee, flush against him, chin resting on his shoulder, his bicep nestled between her breasts.

Heartbeat so loud in her ears he was most likely feeling it as well. Ging continued to stir the coffee, didn’t push her away. This was more comfortable than it had any right to be.

Cheadle wondered if she should perhaps apologize to Ging for speaking to him that way, the night of their reunion. Her anger at him and him specifically that night was for a couple reasons, mainly that he was being careless while Gregory just died. The other thing didn't weigh much. Cheadle didn't care. _She didn't_ . It didn't matter that she found him with Pariston in a sexual tryst or that it was on her bed or that the image of it infested her brain like a million rabbits. It had no impact on her. They were two grown men who could do whatever they wanted. It wasn't like they haven't done things like these before or that she hadn't expected something of this sort to happen again between them. It was silly of her to get upset and bothered over that. _Of course_ , it was really fucking silly. Maybe she should apologize for acting silly over what's practically nothing. It didn't matter, and she resolved to forget it, and forget that it was arousing, and that she almost constantly fantasized about being involved. Horrifying to her was that last part, exactly. Did she _really_ want to be involved? Involved how? Did she want to have sex with one of them? Both of them?

Worse—both of them, together?

Pariston was hoping to make her jealous and at first Cheadle truly believed she was. But she recognized now it wasn't really jealousy she’d felt. She wasn't jealous of either of them for that night.

What she felt was desire.

A sticky, persistent, old desire that encompassed both of them.

"You really shouldn’t take what’s not yours." She murmured close to his ear, felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end.

In a stupid move that she will convince herself a moment later was totally spontaneous, she shoved her hand in his pocket to take back what’s hers, and felt his dick a little hard against her fingers.

In the suddenness and awkwardness of the moment, Ging's hand dived into his pocket and clutched hers with force, holding it in place, barring her from any kind of movement.

For what felt like an eternity, the two of them just stood like that, everything holding its breath except the gurgling sound of boiling coffee between them, about to spill out of the pot and all over the stove.

His grip around her fingers was painful, squeezing them hard, uncomfortable with her proximity but giving her no way out. With his free hand he turned the fire off.

"Will you be so kind as to free my hand?" Cheadle said, her head still on his shoulder, her cheek against his neck. She felt bolder, hearing the slow but forceful thumping of her heart, the way it matched his. He was trying to breathe more normally, too. "You're hurting me."

Ging let go.

When they resumed walking they did so beside one another. The thick canopy of entangled branches began to break apart, but as soon as they exited this patch of forest and into an expanse of mossy rock and weeds, it started raining once again, the leftovers from the last downpour already snaking in hasty clear streams between the rutted, knobby rocks, gaining momentum with the new drizzle, tumbling in panicky droplets down the galloping, barren landscape.

Ging skipped ahead, prancing over a couple mossy white rocks and then stood under the drizzle, tilted his head back, raindrops hammering down his face. Eyes closed he opened his mouth, filling it with rain, water spilling down his chin and jaws and neck. He swallowed, uselessly shook the water out of his hair, glanced at them and then back ahead at the gray horizon, his eyes scouting the slippery road ahead.

They stood on a sweeping, rolling avalanche of rocks, seemingly frozen in time; among the cracks and between the gullies small plants grew, swaying with the agile water streams as they zigzagged among the rocks over the slope and down the eventual smooth cliff face. There was a small cavern under their feet, Ging had said, and it could be accessed only from an opening in the cliff face on another side of the mountain, which they were going to slide down with their bare hands without letting the trickling water slip them to their doom in the valley below.

Still, that was a long way from now, he added, his face hard to read, soaked in rain from head to toe but not minding it in the least, his voice carried away from them as quickly as it left him.

Pariston stood beside her and lifted the freezer tank over their heads. They weren’t going to be dry for a while.

"Quite the summer, no?" Pariston said, a deprecating half-smile gracing his face.

Cheadle shifted her gaze from Ging up to him. "Must be really hard not living your dream vacation.”

"This is exactly my dream vacation." He said under the clobbering sound of rain on nitrile rubber. "Did you two have a fight?" He asked, jabbing his chin in Ging’s direction.

"Not really," she answered. "He’s just been in a mood since morning."

"I hope it’s not the kind of mood that will compel him to ditch us."

Cheadle snorted. "Yeah. I'll go talk to him about where we're headed."

Out from under their makeshift umbrella and under the pouring rain, Cheadle jogged to Ging’s side.

"Hey,"

"Hi."

"Are you okay?" She asked, glancing at his face, the raindrops on her glasses making everything a little blurry.

Ging looked at her. "Yeah, I’m good. If we keep at this pace, I estimate it'll take us another three hours of walking to arrive at the west side."

"We don’t have to move faster," she said. "I don’t want to miss anything."

She had returned her notebook to her pocket a while ago, when the rain threatened to soak it and dilute the ink, but she continued to mentally catalogue everything around her for the time when she could sit somewhere dry and write it down.

Ging shrugged. "You're the boss here."

A glance to the side, a glance back at Pariston, Cheadle cleared her throat. "Hey, look, I'm—"

"Sorry?"

He didn’t look at her.

"Well, yeah, kind of," she said, wanting desperately to not look at him but braving it anyway. "About what happened earlier this morning."

He finally returned her gaze, but only for a second. "It’s fine."

"Is it?"

"Yeah."

Cheadle fell silent for a moment, continued to skip beside him. He was taking such large steps. "We're not gonna be weird about it?"

"Why be weird about it?"

"I don’t know," her shoulder twitched. The rain on her glasses was becoming annoying. She took them off. "It was kind of inappropriate, don’t you think?"

Ging continued walking. "You really have to stop taking everything so seriously. It wasn’t inappropriate or weird, and it didn’t mean anything, so you don’t gotta obsess over it in your obsessive little head."

Cheadle frowned. "Oh, sorry for thinking I might've upset you."

"Nope, you didn’t upset me."

"Would you please stop walking for a fucking second?"

Rain fell harder, drowning the rise in her voice.

He stopped. "What?"

His glare pinned her in place. He looked truly and genuinely irritated by her. She suddenly lost her words, so he filled the silence with his own.

"You want me to validate your embarrassment about touching my dick?" He said with a mean smile. "Here, I validate it. It _was_ embarrassing, you get to feel embarrassed about it without trying to make me feel the same way."

Cheadle chuckled in frustration, pushing wet hair away from her eyes. "Please excuse me for trying to figure out what kind of boundaries we have here," she said. "You’re the one who touched my boobs then had a boner, Ging."

"Okay, this is it." He said with finality, putting his foot down, finally turning to face her proper. He drew a line in the air between them, right across her eyes, his nen a fluttering, dark blue matchstick flame at the tip of his finger. "This is the boundary. Are you satisfied?"

"You can’t be serious," Cheadle cried out at the silly invisible nen wall he erected between them. "Is this really how you want to act?"

He rolled his eyes, shoved his hands back in his pockets and resumed walking. She followed him. "You did something dumb and you want to blame me for it and implicate me so you can feel better about yourself. You want me to explain myself so you can feel comforted, but you don’t even have the guts to just ask or say whatever you really want."

Cheadle stopped so suddenly it made him stop, too. She fell deathly silent, only staring at him with unabashed hurt. He stared back with that same frown he's been sporting since morning.

A little way back, Pariston was watching.

"Fuck you." She pushed his chest with indignant force, dispelling the childish nen wall between them. Ging was thrown back a good six feet away from her.

"Hey!" He protested, but she turned her head and walked away, taking the lead with squared shoulders.

For a moment, she was the only one walking, putting a good distance between herself and them. Pariston caught up to him, having deliberately stood back to let them have their fight. His gaze followed Cheadle's back, then he looked at Ging. "You really did fight, huh."

"Yeah," Ging muttered, not meeting the other's curious gaze, his chest stinging where she had pushed him. "What a weird person."

Pariston chuckled quietly, finally lowering the freezer, letting the rain run its course on him, the futility of trying to keep himself dry more apparent now that the rain refused to stop hammering down on them.

"Come on, let's follow her," Pariston said. "I'm sure you two will make up in an hour or so. You always do."

Ging and Cheadle fought and argued a lot. Always did. Ging doesn’t remember a time where they didn’t bicker endlessly over one thing or the other, and yet he never believed there will ever be a fight they won’t come back from, including this one. His willingness to let go and forgive coupled with her tendency to quickly reassess the disproportion or validity of her reactions—yet rarely admitting her mistakes—usually meant that no argument lasted long enough to sour their relationship.

As long as they butted heads within the arena of work, that is. The second anything turned even a smidge personal she became unreasonably spiteful and hostile. That was true when she was 18 and still unchanged now more than two decades later.

Why did she have to be like this? Everything was easier with Pariston, smoother, somehow less complicated. Pariston wouldn't apologize; there was no sorry between them, no moments of relapse where they come to realize they might have upset the other or hurt his feelings. He could be the shittiest version of himself with Pariston without having to make excuses for it or feel judged. They could pull each other's teeth out and then laugh about it.

Ging didn’t want to hurt her feelings, and knew that what he had said and how he had acted was as much in knee-jerk self-defense as indictment of one of her most aggravating personal flaws.

Because despite acting otherwise, he deeply felt as awkward and shy about what had happened in the kitchen as she did, but he didn’t know why she had to make a big deal out of it, or why she felt the need to drag him down in her constant struggle to claim the moral high ground, even to her own detriment.

Always, she forgot, that he's on her side.

He smirked up at Pariston. "Wanna run?"

They were both burdened by heavy loads, Ging having carried their food, camp set-up, and his sleeping bag, Pariston responsible for a precious box of samples.

The cascading rock surface under them was a land of hazards: smooth and wet and mossy, replicating itself as far as the eye can see.

"Yeah, sure," Pariston smiled, strapping the freezer to his back and tightening its straps around his shoulders and waist. "The finish line?"

"The cliff."

Pariston took off. He was fast.

"Bastard." Ging laughed, bounced up and then zipped ahead. Pariston could run fast but he couldn’t jump as high as him.

His lungs filled with air, his face whipped by warm, erratic rain, Ging ran fast, shutting the part of his brain that kept reminding him of the pain in his lower left leg, and there was pain, a lot of it, and he felt it every time his foot hit the ground, felt every bone a wrong foothold away from shattering, but he banished everything to do with it, kept only the part of himself about to close the distance with Pariston.

Once he was close enough, Ging took one big leap, flew through the air in a long bow, and landed upside down with hands on Pariston's shoulders. For a second they came face to face, their foreheads touching, before Ging flipped over Pariston and to the ground, taking an uncalculated moment to pivot triumphantly, long enough for Pariston to slide himself down and jam his leg between Ging's feet, who caught himself a second before falling down on his head, balancing his whole body up on his arm, trying to hook his foot in Pariston's neck to bring him down too, but the latter careened to the side and with a strong hand grabbed Ging's leg. The injured one.

In less than a second of agonizing pain, Ging lost his balance.

Pariston didn’t loosen his grip, managing with surprising strength to haul Ging up from his leg off the ground, up in the air and slam him on the ground again. But instead of seizing the opportunity to claim the lead, Pariston stood over him while he lay on the ground, tightened his grip in wanton cruelty around Ging's ankle.

"You want to play dirty, huh." Ging smirked, rolled his body to trap Pariston’s arm between his legs, twisted it then kicked him with his right leg smack on the side of his face. Pariston budged back, and only let go of Ging's ankle when his own shoulder threatened to dislodge.

Ging took a long breath, trying to quell the pain that now filled his whole body. It was like a stinging heatwave that seared a hole in his left calf and rippled across every bone and muscle and nerve. He gritted his teeth. It will go. The pain will go. It always did. He just needed a moment.

Soaked, his glistening hair tousled in every direction, his cheeks buffed and rosy, Pariston flopped down on the rocks, clutching his shoulder in silent pain. "It was really about to pop right out!"

"You deserve it, asshole."

Pariston laughed. "Maybe so. Sorry about your leg."

"I'm going to break your fucking spine with it."

Pariston offered him a sly, coquettish look. "Yeah?"

In a heartbeat they were both back up again and running, their strength a little diminished but not their competitiveness, their bodies the only obstacles they put for each other. Ging refrained from bouncing around this time, acute pain still gripping his muscles, making him feel almost feverish. Why couldn’t he ignore it, why couldn’t it go? He hated every second of it.

Pariston didn’t just want to slow him down, he wanted to hurt him, maliciously, and knew how to. Ging begrudged this physical weakness that had become visible to them, felt his whole body lesser for it. The despair he felt when he fucked with it was a little distant now, and for a moment he couldn’t remember why he chose to hurt himself in that way. Was it some kind of unconscious self-harm? A latent desire to punish himself in some way? A proof that he could still keep going, even by himself? It was all and none of those.

In the disorienting fog of repressed pain, his eyes sought Cheadle.

Her figure was hazy among the descending ropes of rain, but he saw her, a little far away to their right, squatting down beside something, her back to him, her head of bright green hair like an accidental brush stroke in an otherwise drab, gray landscape.

What was she looking at? Should he go? That was always the worst part of their fights, the immediate aftermath, where they stop talking for a good while and he has to think twice before approaching her.

He looked ahead for Pariston, who had come to a stop a good distance away from him, and seemed a little listless that Ging wasn’t entirely committed to the race.

Weird. He really thought they were closer than this to the cliff side, but every direction he looked he only saw the mounds of mossy rocks, extending indefinitely into the misty horizon. Pariston, too, appeared a little confused.

Subtle, imperceptible alterations in landscape weren’t a new thing to him on the continent. It didn’t happen often, but enough times to be noticeable for anyone who lived long enough here. Sometimes a forest expanded, or shrunk, sometimes a tree he'd marked in one region appeared elsewhere, a clearing or another gone, a whole patch of one genus in one place transforming into another. It wasn’t just an ecosystem in a natural, constant cycle of death and regeneration, but an eldritch, puzzling topography rearranging and remolding its pieces every so often, a chessboard with gaping sinkholes for squares played on by ten different people with clashing strategies, and every single attempt on his part to coax out a pattern had failed.

Ging was not the animistic type, and his first instinct to any of Don's belletristic ramblings was always going to be skepticism, but at times he was inclined to believe the old man when he assured Ging that every existing thing on the continent, even the smallest pebble, had a mind of its own.

When he gazed her way again, Cheadle was nowhere to be seen. Before he could decide whether to walk towards her or not, Pariston was already moving.

They reached the spot of her disappearance simultaneously, and found themselves peering down a dark, open mouth of rocks and grass, a hole in the surface of the ground the diameter of a wood barrel and about seven foot deep that appeared neither dug nor a natural, recently-occurring depression. It seemed to lead down a narrow cavern.

"Cheadle?" Pariston called for her.

"Yeah! I’m down here." Her voice trickled a distant echo out of the hole.

She didn’t sound distressed or hurt.

"You okay?"

"I’m fine, just can’t see shit. I’m sensing my way through."

A beat, footsteps, then she appeared and looked up, her face illuminated by the light outside while the rest of her remained submerged in total darkness, a disembodied mask. She stared up at their curious faces, her wet bangs falling away from her forehead, forgone her glasses for _Gyo_ , eyes bright and so clear Ging could see the rain falling in them.

"Yeah, hi, seems I found an opening to the cavern on the cliff side. Maybe it’s a shortcut." She said, scratching the marks on the sides of her nose left by the glasses pads. "It’s pretty shallow for a cavern opening, and there’s only one way forward. I think we'll have to crawl down here."

Rain water pooled down at her feet, cascaded around her in the grooves and crannies of rock and stone, and appeared to dribble down into the deeper recesses of the cavern, away from sight.

Then she seemed to realize that her purpose for venturing into the cavern wasn’t clear. "Look,” she raised her arm to the light, showing them long, white strings Ging recognized as shiol filaments. “I want to see how far spread the fungi are, compare climates. Who knows, maybe we'll find other things down here as well."

Pariston squatted on the edge of the opening to inspect the landing. He could stand in it comfortably at full height but will probably struggle with the narrow spaces ahead. "Would I even fit in there?"

"Yeah, you will, but it won’t be comfortable," Cheadle said. "I inspected it deeper and we can all go in, but one at a time and without our bags on us."

"Drag them behind us or push them ahead?"

"They go first," she said. "I'll go first, too. I’m the smallest here."

Pariston nodded and began untying the freezer straps to push them off his shoulder. "What if we encounter a dead-end?" He asked, holding the freezer and lowering it down slowly for her to grab.

Cheadle took it, maneuvering it carefully to prevent it from bumping against the rocks. "The water pathways suggest a wide network of sub-caves and an outlet for the rain water," she said, setting the freezer tank on the ground, then gently pushed it ahead where it slid over shallow water. "I don’t think we'll get stuck. Worst case scenario, we'll smash ourselves out."

She straightened up and lifted her arms to Ging. "Your bags, please."

Once all their loads were lowered down, Cheadle pulled out a rope, unfurled it, and started creating knots in two places. "I’ll tie the rope to me while you keep the other end, when the knot drops into the chute, Pariston will jump down and follow me, and then Ging will go last, alright? I'll maintain a nen signature, as a precaution."

They nodded, and soon enough Cheadle disappeared inside the cavern. They could still hear the shuffling of her clothes and of their bags against the hard ground and the sound of moving water, but about five minutes later, every sign of her was gone.

The two of them remained crouched around the hole, waiting. The rain slowed down, turned to gentle drizzle, then stopped. Cheadle still hadn’t called.

"I feel bad for her," Pariston said, pushing his hair back. "She’s pretty claustrophobic."

Ging already knew that. "That’s the least of her concerns right now."

He wasn’t worried about Cheadle, she could always handle herself; he was more concerned with the appearance of this entrance, a seemingly natural and old feature of the landscape but one he was certain didn’t exist the last time he was here, and he crossed this stretch of mossy rocks pretty often.

The rope moved, the first knot slithered down into the chute, Pariston sighed. "Here’s my cue. See you down there."

And then he too was gone. Ging sat alone on the surface, gazing up at the parting clouds. It wasn’t going to be a sunny day, but he doubted it will rain again soon. He could sense an oncoming rainstorm, his nose picking up on the distant scents of condensed air, but he estimated it won’t arrive today. He hoped they'd be out of this cavern by then. He had his fair share of getting stuck in tight and damp places at night. It wasn’t pleasant, and he didn’t at all like the sinister aura that hung in the air.

Something other than the three of them was wandering the place.

He scouted the long, jagged line where the rock surface stopped and the forest they'd left behind began, and there, far away among the trees, camouflaged against the brown and green, Ging saw a familiar figure. Slightly changed, but he recognized it.

Human faced and four legged, it stared right back at him.

"What do you want this time?" He yelled.

It didn’t answer.

The rope moved. Ging hopped down.

**III**

His eyes took a while to adjust to the darkness inside the narrow tunnel, and even then, sight was the least reliable sense in places like these. Ging could see neither of them, not even a glimpse of the soles of Pariston's boots, but he heard them, and smelled them, and trailed with his fingers the marks their crawling left behind. The only light source was the one they descended from, and he couldn’t turn his head even if he wanted to.

A cocoon of wet stone, it was squeezing him forward. Pariston must be really uncomfortable, and Cheadle was most likely the one fairing best. Whenever a cave exploration opportunity presented itself, they always sent their smallest members first, and at times a cave or a tunnel would be so narrow only petit people could enter it. Ging was that, when he was much, much younger, small and sturdy and quick on his feet, 12 year old and ready to plunge himself into the darkest depths just for the thrill of it.

He began his hunting career a tiny, short boy tagging along explorations and expeditions, and most often people older and bigger than him sent him—loaded with cameras and sensors—into the gaping mouths of underwater caves, the inky veins of abandoned mines, the jagged, slippery tunnels of flowstones where they couldn’t hope to enter. He knew even then one day he won’t be able to squeeze himself into these places, no matter how fit or agile, so he spent the better part of his adolescence visiting and exploring the most difficult, most mysterious caves on the mainland, a race against time before some places rejected him for good and welcomed others.

Ging loved the primordiality of these places, the centuries that shaped them, how they amplified and muffled, the way they called for him, shut him out, scared and thrilled him, the duality of refuge and trap, how it spelled a person's demise just as likely as it protected them from predators.

The Dark Continent had no shortage of these places—wild, massive beasts of geological wonder, some that called louder and clearer than others, some that had almost killed him.

In comparison, this one was tame. So far, anyway. Some pits only reveal their true selves when it’s too late.

Only he imagined the possibility that it might disappear, or shift, or change, all while they were still in its depths, that the chess pieces were going to move in time, that they might exit the cavern to find themselves somewhere very far away from here. Or they might not exit it at all.

Although fortunately, if even for a bit, the ceiling pressing down on Ging's back elevated, and the narrow tunnel began slowly unraveling into a wider shaft, and he predicted that they would soon arrive at a cave chamber.

He wiped sweat off his forehead, his arm gaining a larger range of movement, started feeling the heat and humidity, and for a moment was glad for crawling, letting his left leg go numb as he dragged it across the floor. The nen he pooled into it to fortify it against further damage was useless, for now. It only hurt him more.

Those damn expired painkillers. He should stop being too proud about taking them.

Ahead, Ging heard a commotion. He squinted in the dark, Pariston's outline growing more visible now that he could walk on his knees and hands. Farther ahead, Cheadle had come to a stand.

Finally, a chamber.

Last to reach it, Ging pushed himself up and felt his way towards his bag, huddled in the middle of the chamber along with all their other stuff.

Multiple gusts of wind of different temperatures whistled past him. One colder than the other, one that carried a worse smell. There were a couple branching paths here, but he couldn’t see any. The floor was wet under his feet. He heard their breathing, smelt the humid, limited oxygen they all shared with measured inhales, but he couldn’t see them.

They needed a light.

"So, do you think we might find weird bugs in here?" Pariston, his voice a breathless chuckle.

Ging lit up the torch. Pariston had his answer.

The walls of the chamber were lined from floor to ceiling with black, hairy, sketchy arthropods, crusty creatures between a crab and a spider, each one the size of a small fist, their bald heads glistening in the fire light, their swarm of pointy legs contracting close to their fat, round bodies which shook ever so slightly, like one huge nervous system sending danger signals from one node to the other. Either they gather closer in fear or bolt in every direction. One of these two possibilities was better than the other for the unwitting human side of this encounter.

In the middle of the chamber, the three of them were completely surrounded by jittery, panicky, weird bugs, ready to bounce at the slightest incursion. But Ging wasted no time testing them; they were afraid of fire, huddling together and scurrying in one fortified platoon farther up the ceiling when he swept the torch near them. Good.

Pariston sighed in defeat. "I hate this."

“They bite.” Ging warned.

Cheadle walked closer, her steps soundless, and peered at the flighty creatures, the fire light illuminating half of her face. "What do they eat?" She asked in a murmur, and gave the wall a little, gentle tap, under one of the crusty spiders, which caused it to creep away in fear, shaking its hairs, sending the whole colony one extra foot up. She tapped again. Ging followed them with the light of his torch.

The chamber ceiling became alive, twitching over their heads, peering down at them thousands of round, smooth, eyeless heads, faces empty but for four pairs of sharp mandibles.

"Each other, mostly."

The fire revealed little burrows all over the walls where piles of dead spiders lay, torn open, dissected, their bodies oozing a white, creamy gunk, surrounded by their hungry, feasting larvae.

"They aggregate and build nests beside small water bodies."

"And they have temperature sensors, right?" Cheadle said.

Ging nodded. "They can’t smell or see. Or hear, for the matter, but they don’t need that. Together, they’re basically a highly accurate weather forecast, they evolved to instantly recognize the vibration pattern and temperature of their predators. We're pretty large, but we probably don’t feel like enemies to them. Our temperatures are different." He said. "Unless we directly cause harm, they'll keep away."

"So they can lead us to the nearest body of water?"

"I believe so," Ging grinned. "Wanna spook them?"

A tiny smile found its way to her face. "Let’s spook them."

"Can we have a moment to psychologically prepare ourselves first?" Pariston piped up from behind them, standing right in the middle of the chamber where he was farthest away from any weird bug. He didn’t bother hiding his disgust.

"You can have it while we pack our stuff." Cheadle said, already reaching to pick up her bags. "Ready?"

The torch flame swayed, flickered, and then flared up in a massive blaze that lit up the whole chamber and everything in it. The water under their feet turned a vivid orange for a second, and like a sheet of plastic, the spiders shrunk on themselves against the heat, huddling, their legs clicking in panicked alarm, then they skittered in one full cloud of screeching black into the left side tunnel.

"Let’s move."

They entered the left tunnel, following the rapid, frenzied clacking of thousands of legs all across the ceiling, closer to each other this time around, the tunnel opening wide and then gradually, as they moved farther inside, narrowing.

Heat and humidity increased, and Ging could feel the oxygen entering his lungs thicker, turbid, as he led the way, the heavy air coating his skin with a thin film of sweat, his fingers around the torch hot and clammy. Close to them, behind a curved wall, he could hear water running.

He stopped and turned around once they arrived at a tight, crescent-shaped opening, lined at one side with drooping, sharp flowstones, where he watched the little critters slip inside in one big arching ribbon. Water poured inside as well from tiny gaps at the base of the wall.

A tight squeeze, even for Cheadle. If they wanted to pass it, they'd have to climb over a couple sharp rocks, cross the distance sideways, and then slip inside this sickle, still sideways, mindful of the protruding rock icicles, one misstep away from impaling them in the eye.

Ging stepped over the ledge rocks and climbed the wall, trying to discern what lay beyond the opening. "There’s a narrow landing, but it’s pretty far down, and I can make out what seems like a sharp slope." He turned back to them. "Take the torch," he handed it to Pariston, then with his free hand fished a small stone out of his pocket and tossed it to the other side. A thud, two, and then a blob. "It’s like a waterslide. We're gonna have to climb down the wall before jumping to the landing. Cheadle?"

She nodded and started shedding her load. "I'll go first, hand me back the bags once I’m on the other side. Again, don’t follow until I give you a signal."

Ging offered her a hand to help her up. She accepted it, and for a short moment they stood chest to chest on shaky rocks. He smiled at her. "Suck in your tummy."

Her hand reached for a jutting rock over his head to the left, then grabbed it and pulled herself up, clinging to the wall with careful steps before reaching the sharp edge of the crevice, where she firmly planted her foot, taking hold of the flowstones across from her to slide her body through the opening, legs first. Grabbing onto the wall, she glanced down at the landing and the ensuing slope, and seemed to notice the same ledge across from her that he'd seen earlier.

"I'll jump to that ledge on the opposite wall," she said. "When I’m there, just drop me the bags."

Cheadle let go of the wall and jumped.

"What do you see?" Ging's voice echoed through the cavern.

"Standing water, at the base of the slope." She looked up. "There’s a narrow gap, we'll have to dive under it. It’s not clear how deep the water is or how much air space we'll have."

Ging dropped her the bags, took back the torch from Pariston and made way for him to climb the wall.

Then they heard a loud water splash.

"Cheadle?"

She didn’t answer.

Pariston was balancing on the edge of the opening, leaning his back far against the wall and away from the sharp rocks that almost grazed his eyeballs. He took a look down, his face calm, expectant, both of them silent, waiting for a sign of her.

Then came the sound of water splashing against the walls.

Then Cheadle laughed.

"It _is_ like a waterslide!" Her voice rang through the walls, sincerely joyous for the first time since Ging had seen her again. "It’s fun!"

He and Pariston shared a grin.

"Just watch your heads when you slide down, I almost conked mine against the gap's edge."

"That’s because your forehead is gigantic." Pariston yelled down at her, having managed to grab onto the wall on the other side.

"Shut up will you." But she didn’t sound upset, only chuckled, then laughed some more when Pariston splashed down in the water beside her.

Ging extinguished the torch in a puddle of water then followed them, opting out of jumping down to the ledge and instead climbed the wall down the old fashioned way, reached the head of the slope, and let himself go.

Now he hoped his lungs wouldn’t fail him.

The water, as he expected, was freezing cold. His body sunk down in the force of the momentum, and his head turned around in the murky water, trying to make up his surroundings.

Pink and orange cave salamanders swayed in couples under his feet, passing little, translucent stygophiles like water snails and albino shrimps wobbling against walls. Long dark weeds brushed past his legs, and then farther back, wispy and frail, he saw strings of mycelium dancing in the water. He swam up to the surface, his forehead making contact with the low ceiling that pressed down on them.

"Did you see the mycelium?" He asked, removing hair away from his eyes.

"Yeah," Cheadle nodded. "I think they're growing south of here, telling by the direction of the roots."

For a moment they all paddled slowly in place, keeping themselves afloat in this flooded chamber, trying to keep their heads over water, tilting them back for more breathing space, holding their breath, measuring every inhale.

The oxygen was limited. They had to move fast.

This time, Ging took the lead. He was the best swimmer here. His forgotten, ignored ailment aside—which he’s succeeded in managing through sheer willpower so far—he could hold his breath the longest and was the most capable of deep diving to trail the mycelium and locate the exits out of this chamber. Head over water, he could absolutely see no way out, no tunnel or chute or even a gap or a hole in the wall.

His lungs were just gonna have to shut up and do the job.

With a big inhale, Ging dived into inky blackness, the two above aiding his sight with flashlights that glowed blearily in the water.

The pool was eight feet deep at the highest point, and the farther down he swam, the more he sensed that the ground under them wasn’t solid. The floor of the pool lurched and lulled under him, darker streams of water snaking above it. He tapped a foot on the ground. It didn’t budge, his movement only kicking up some debris. He couldn’t see much.

Overhead, dead insects of various kinds hung in the water, frozen, their exoskeletons catching some of the meager light in their disintegration, some more decayed than others, and some yet struggled in the clutches of the malnourished fungi roots, the shiols having colonized such a resources-starved pit. Some of the famished roots sensed him and reached for him. He scared them away with a burst of nen, and they shrunk, confused.

He wasn’t about to quell their parasitic hunger.

Ging only swam back up when he finally located a viable exit; yet another tunnel, one that seemed to lead up, but it was blocked by a thick, tangled web of lurching fungi roots. He could destroy it, but Cheadle probably wouldn’t like that very much.

"Can’t you find another exit?" She asked, a little out of breath even though he was the one who just came out of the water. "I want the colony intact as much as possible."

Ging swallowed, the metallic taste of blood filling his mouth. He had to turn away just to cough and take a breath.

He dived again.

With eyes more adjusted to darkness, Ging found a couple more tunnels, one his instincts told him lead to a dead-end, another one in the ground he ignored because for a moment, he didn’t trust his capability of handling any more water pressure, then a last one, marked by a sliver of light, a few gray flakes swaying inside a small rock opening. He sought it.

After further inspection, he came back up.

"Found a chute, it also leads up, to a wider pool I think, and there’s a light source up there," he said. "But this path is much narrower than the other exit and we'll have to swim up for a few minutes." He looked at Cheadle, his chest stinging. "So, which?"

"We'll take the chute," she said. "I can hold my breath. Pariston?"

His hair slicked back, Pariston swam a circle around them. "Yeah, easy. You know," he trailed, staring at Cheadle with twinkling eyes. "You should’ve imprisoned me in a house with a pool. I haven’t done any serious swimming in a while."

"You used to surf as a teen, right?" Ging said, recalling a silly old story Pariston had told once.

Pariston smiled wide, delighted that Ging remembered.

"How would your surfer boy days even help us now?" Cheadle asked, not entirely unamused, probably remembered the surfing story too.

Pariston's shoulders rose out of the water in a cheeky shrug. "They won’t. I’m just here to follow orders and stand pretty."

"You’re succeeding."

"Thank you."

Cheadle turned to Ging, her carefree smile dimming. "Ready to go down again?"

"Yeah."

With flashlights in hand, the three dived into the water, and headed towards the opening in the rocks, swimming towards the plates of floating light.

Once inside the opening, Ging flipped on his back, glided to the base of the chute, planted his foot on a rock and propelled himself upward, grabbing a ledge on his way up to increase momentum. There was barely any room to flap one's arms, only their legs and whatever they could grab onto helped them forward towards the hazy light above.

Then his bag got stuck.

Ging tried to shake it off his shoulders, his fingers working instantly to untie the straps around his waist, and he could feel it, the blood piling up in his lungs again, rising to his throat. He swallowed it and looked down, Cheadle nodded at him. If he dropped it, she'll push it up after him.

Finally loose, Ging weaseled his way out from under the bag, the right side of his face scraping against craggy rocks, then when the bag was at his feet he took a chance at a floating strap and hooked his foot in it, trying to carry it up with him. The fact that it was his left leg he was relying on didn’t help. Neither did the web of roots that blocked the surface. Cheadle can be upset about this later. He broke through them, watched them wriggle sideways into the banks and out of their way.

His head broke out of the water with a massive inhale, and then he couldn’t force the pile in his throat down again. He crawled out of the water and to the surface, grabbling to get away, near mindless of his surroundings, and fell into a coughing fit that left him a little loopy and a little bloody. The gash on his face stung, oozing hot blood.

Ging took deep, long breaths, wiped his mouth, licked tangy blood off his lips, and smeared the rest of it on his face.

Behind him, his bag popped out of the water with a force that flung it straight to the shore, and then Cheadle crept out and fell on her back, arms stretched out on either side, her chest collapsing and rising rapidly as she sucked in new, fresh air. Pariston followed, the one most out of breath, and flopped down next to her.

Above them, through the opening in the rock dome they found themselves washed in, crept warm sunlight.

Cheadle jolted up to stare at him, as if suddenly remembering his presence. "Your face! You?" She turned to Pariston, giving him a quick but discerning once over.

"I’m okay."

"There’s your fungi," Ging said. "Sorry I killed them.”

To his right, spread over a shaded wall, stretched a frail, dying colony of shiols, pale blue caps stacked over one another like a building about to collapse under its own weight, its supporting infrastructure dry and withered, slipping off the wall, cascading to the ground.

Cheadle stood up and walked towards the wall, her eyes surveying the irreparable damage endured by this small colony. "You didn’t kill them..." she muttered, touching a white, ghostly mushroom. "They were already dying." She stood with her head down, visibly crestfallen. "I’m sorry, for wasting time. I should’ve predicted this."

"What the hell are you talking about?" Ging said. "We found a dead colony, so what? We'll find a living one. This is still day one, have you forgotten?"

"And on the brighter side, we have some time to breathe," Pariston added, pointing to the hole in the ceiling over their heads. "We'll go somewhere airier."

Cheadle nodded, smiling softly. "Yeah, I just don’t want our efforts to be for nothing," she frowned, determined. "I really can’t afford to waste time."

As she pulled her leather roll out of her bag, Pariston jumped, grabbing the edge of the ceiling hole and pulling himself up to inspect the place above. Cheadle brought her first aid kit and sat on the ground opposite Ging.

“Let me see your wound.” She said, taking his chin between her fingers to turn his head.

"You're injured, too."

"I know." She didn’t glance down at the trail of blood on her right arm, the long tear on her sleeve. "I'll see to it in a minute. Let me check your face first."

"It’s fine." Ging resisted, didn’t want her to smell the blood staining the insides of his mouth.

"It doesn’t look it," she argued back firmly. "It needs cleaning and stitching; there still might be active spores in the water. You don’t want them in your open wounds."

Finally, Ging relented, and sat silently opposite her, straining his eyes to see the way she sutured his wound. She was fast, her hand moving up and down in the periphery of his vision.

"Your skin will absorb the thread so it won’t leave a mark."

Ging rolled his eyes. "Thanks, I’m really worried about a scar on my face."

He shouldn’t have said that. Now she seemed to notice his face a little _too_ much, a little too closely, her bright eyes seizing him carefully, almost coldly, compiling a visual inventory of every detail of his facial damage.

"I mean it doesn’t matter, just use whatever kind of string." He was becoming self-conscious under her scrutinizing gaze. What was she seeing anyway? Her eyes without glasses were a little creepy.

She smiled. "You don’t deserve those pretty eyelashes."

Ging averted his gaze. "Look, about what I said earlier,"

"I know, it's okay," she cut him off. "I overreacted, we don’t have to talk about it and make it awkward all over again. I just want to focus on the mission."

"I owe you an apology."

"You don’t. Or maybe you do. For being needlessly mean, at least.” She said, eyes back at her work. “You were right. I’m just so high strung about everything, stuck on the little shit. But then, going down that slope, I felt like a kid, and I thought 'it doesn’t have to be like this'. I don’t have to be so serious.” She scoffed at herself. “So what if you had a random boner in the morning?” She laughed nervously. “I mean, come on, that’s not even the most embarrassing thing that happened with us in the same place, right?”

 _It wasn’t random_ , he wanted to say but didn’t. That would open a whole ‘nother conversation he really did not want to have, a conversation he wasn’t even having with himself yet. Ging sensed, too, from the turn of her face, the way her hands tied the thread of his suture and then fumbled around with the equipment, that she purposefully used the word 'random' for pretty much the same reasons. Was she giving him a way out, a bridge back to where they didn’t really have to acknowledge anything? Or was she trying to mainly convince herself of something? If he didn’t say anything, that would be the end of it.

"I reacted that way because I got embarrassed, too, both times." He admitted. 

"Yeah, I guessed," she said, nodded several times. "That’s why I was upset. In defending yourself, you hurt me.” 

Ging looked away, touching the new texture of the stitches on his cheek. “I didn’t mean to.” 

“I know.” His eyes met hers again. She looked disarmingly earnest. “Can I tell you something? You probably already know that I broke multiple laws by coming here with Pariston. I didn’t have to, and I could have taken legal routes, but I didn’t.” She glanced away from him again, the sunlight seeping into the chamber lending a serenity to the green of her eyes. “Seeing everything, I can’t help but think sometimes that, maybe, it would be better if I weren’t here at all, that I’m here selfishly."

"It wouldn’t be better," Ging said. "Look at me. It wouldn’t be better. Who’s gonna come up with a vaccine? Me? Pariston? You’re here because you’ve survived this place and know your shit. Besides, what if you are here selfishly? _I’m_ here selfishly. I _called_ you here selfishly."

"Hey!" Pariston called for them from above the dome, peeking his head through the opening. "We can rest up here for a bit and get dry, there’s enough space and it’s warm. I should also mention there are huge birds circling above." Then he disappeared outside again, one leg dangling down the hole.

Her face moved closer to Ging’s. "Why is Pariston here?"

He smiled. "A wild card."

"Why do you need a wild card, Ging?"

"Cheadle, why does anybody ever keep a wild card?" He asked, not awaiting an answer. "If I remember correctly, when you play chess, it’s your bishops you like to keep for last, right?" She nodded. "Pariston is my bishops."

They gazed long at each other. He could tell the dozens of questions swarming her mind, and was a little surprised when she didn’t end up asking any. She only stood up and helped him to his feet, then joined Pariston up on the dome surface, not bothering with anything but nen for her own wound.

The coffee was still hot, surprisingly, preserved along with their food inside what Ging found to be the best natural, water-resistant preserver in the world, and the stickiest: the coagulant saliva of the colossal, carnivorous anemone. He’s got a whole barrel of it back on the ship, courtesy of Don. That stuff was precious.

As he glided the food out of the sticky, viscous substance, Pariston kissed him on his wound.

Ging flinched back, bemused. "What the hell?"

Pariston laughed, and lay on his back, eyes closed, smiling. "That’ll make it heal faster."

A gust of warm wind passed over him. He loved the sun, he loved the air and the open sky. Yet, in the tight annals and darkness of the cavern, his persistent headache had subsided significantly, and he wasn’t sure if it were for the above reasons or because he was focused on immediate tasks that he simply forgot the pain.

That morning, woken up by the sound of Cheadle's shuffling around the room, Pariston had seriously considered just straight up asking her for help. He never liked to say "my headache is killing me", always thought it a cheap underselling of the pain of it, because whatever agony he felt during every episode was surely worse than death, but the recent spurts of pain have been long, incessant, and acute. At times, even, they filled his vision with fantastic colors. He’s been feeling it since yesterday during dinner preparation and all throughout the night, then it continued unabated upon waking up, in the forest, racing Ging, and now, he felt it coming back, its onset a hazy spectrum of colors dancing in the corners of his eyes.

If he was right about its timing—and he almost always was these days—the headache will come back in full force around the afternoon, will recede at nightfall but only momentarily, and then will probably keep him in a state of half-sleep all throughout the night. But if he woke up fine tomorrow, it will give him a break for most of the day.

He glanced at Ging's leg. Pariston had only a glimpse of what was under the bandages, yesterday in the infirmary. It didn’t look pretty at all, and he didn’t get to be privy to the details behind it, but he knew for sure that Ging must be terribly frustrated by its state.

How sad. It seemed not even the best can escape decay.

Pariston's eyes watered at the hot coffee touching his parched throat, and a long yawn escaped his chest. He could fall asleep for a hundred years right in this spot.

A flock of those birds flew overhead. They really were huge. He hoped they didn’t look like food from down here.

"I feel like a vulture on the edge of a nest." He said, his gaze wandering the endless expanse of sky above him, the relatively small rock they were currently occupying, the insane height from which they overlooked the world.

Like the first time Pariston got to see it from a massive altitude, he felt mystified at the sheer, incomprehensible size of this land. From up here, he could see Lake Harkenburg, shimmering under the translucent shafts of sunlight that broke through the clouds, descending down to encompass the mammoth trees farther north.

On her map, Cheadle was searching for an area to cross with her pen, but she didn't find it.

"You've never been here before?" She asked Ging, who's been silent, holding the coffee cup in both hands, staring at the distance. "I assume you would've mapped it."

He looked at her. "This _cavern_ has never been here before."

A Cheadle who hadn't experienced something similar would have argued that perhaps he simply didn't see it, but there was a look of recognition in her eyes, an implicit understanding.

They never talked about it, she and him, but Pariston was certain she too experienced the strange architectural shifts in the settlement complex, rooms that appear and disappear, ones you see once and never again, a second turn towards one lab or the next that didn't exist the other day, an extra step in the staircase up to the roof that disappears on the way down. He knew that. He counted. Cheadle counted, too.

So it wasn't just the settlement undergoing subtle, seemingly organic alterations, but the land itself, its geography, and perhaps its very makeup.

"Why do you think that happens?" Cheadle asked. "How can an entire cavern like this, containing live bio organisms and an ecosystem, just come to appear out of nowhere?"

Ging tilted his head. "I think it's some kind of response, maybe to new human presence."

"But humans have always come here."

"They didn't come in such large numbers, and they didn't stay for long," he said. "The past decade and some is the first time human presence has persisted continuously in the continent."

She frowned. "What about your grandfather, then?"

"He's not exempt."

"But this theory implies the continent is sentient in some way, communicating or seeking revenge or defending itself against an invasive species," she argued. "Do you believe that? I know you don't subscribe to such teleological nonsense."

"I don't," Ging agreed. "That's why I don't have a definitive, satisfying, scientifically-sound answer for you. It's a mystery."

"Is nothing of the sort mentioned in the inscriptions you've been studying?" Pariston asked. "It's an interesting phenomenon, isn't it? Wouldn't the ancient, linguistically-gifted inhabitants of the land know about it?"

"What's a mystery to us now might have been just a regular part of life to them," Ging said. "So they wouldn’t have had the need to record what amounts to a mundanity."

"Like the kingdom of Sal-Ith," Cheadle added. "It was so grand and well-known that none of its bordering nations bothered recording where it actually was. It was simply assumed that everybody at the time knew where a kingdom that wealthy and influential was located. So many places were also mentioned relative to its location, which only complicated matters."

Ging nodded, a smile creeping to his face. "Besides, nothing proves those ancient inhabitants were humans, anyway."

Pariston smiled too. "Something like the Chimera Ants?"

"Yeah, it's a possibility. The self-portraits they left behind are anatomically vague at best."

Now, Pariston felt greatly interested. He never did get to play around with his Chimera Ants, after all the trouble that went into collecting them, breeding them, caring for them, because Cheadle had taken that from him, too. Pariston believed now that his Chimera Ant army was his 'last' great effort, and after that the world became bleak in a way that did not suit him at all.

Would he get a second chance, to redo his experiment? Probably not. Although, he thought with silent, ponderous relish, he might get something much more interesting. Besides, nothing was ever compelling in its natural habitat; it's only when you take a creature out of its comfort zone that you can see what it's truly made of, that it becomes worthy of note.

"Perhaps the people of those ancient civilizations knew how to harness and use nen?" Cheadle wondered aloud. "Maybe the geographical shifts are a latent or postmortem collective hatsu. Instances like these are rare but documented, and we know for certain that nen can and does at times persist after death."

"But this wouldn't explain why we see those changes in the settlement complex as well," Pariston said. "And it's been built pretty recently, relatively speaking."

"It would," Cheadle retorted. "Dotti Steis's tree."

"Aren’t we on this fungi hunting trip because you have a pretty strong hunch about it?" Ging asked, leaning back on his elbows.

She nodded.

Pariston suddenly gasped. "I forgot to give you the jam to try! It's in the bag, I should get it."

"There he goes again," Cheadle rolled her eyes. "You'd think he re-invented the whole culinary arts."

Ging chuckled. "But I did try it."

"You did?"

"Yeah, it's pretty good."

Cheadle leaned towards him. "Did you ever taste anything like it?"

Ging squinted playfully at her. "Asking for science or for a friend?"

Cheadle laughed. "For science, asshole."

"I did, actually." He said.

"Oh no," Pariston lamented. "I'm hurt."

Ging smiled at him. "That doesn’t mean it doesn’t taste great, but if you want to make something truly special here, you need to learn from those who already make it, and then surpass them."

"Your grandpa?"

Ging smirked. "He cooks all sorts of shit, and makes me try everything. I'm his appointed food taster."

"Do you think if your grandpa tried Pariston's jam, he'd be able to break it down to its base components?" Cheadle asked, excited. "Would he be able to tell where the original grafted trees came from?"

"Yeah, I think he could." Ging said. "His tastes are pretty eclectic. He eats shit that would make the most undiscriminating gourmet Hunter barf."

"And he plants edible crops, right?"

"Right."

Cheadle and Pariston smiled giddily, their eyes twinkling. Ging's gaze wandered between them. "You want to meet him, huh."

They nodded.

"Fine."

"What's he like?"

"A lot like me but nicer."

Cheadle snorted. "So like Gon."

Ging twisted his mouth. "Don't insult my son like this."

"By what, comparing him to you or to Don?"

"By implying he's _that_ flavor of nice."

"How do you mean?"

Ging smirked. "You'll know it when you see it." He gave her a good-hearted accusatory glance. "You two are kinda alike, if I think about it."

"Excuse me?" Cheadle frowned. "Are you saying I'm an annoying flavor of nice?"

Ging sighed. "That's not what I'm saying, but since you love to dig up these conversations, here: you're not an annoying flavor of nice, you _perform_ an annoying flavor of nice."

"And you're annoyed by it?"

Ging shrugged. "No, because I see through it."

"Like you see through your grandfather's niceness." Pariston interjected.

"My point exactly, but _some_ one loves to take things personally."

"I don’t actu—" Cheadle started then promptly stopped herself, took a long breath, and sighed. "Okay, I understand now."

"Good. So," Ging roused himself up, taking a big breath. "Shall we go back into the cavern or climb down the cliff face?"

Pariston glanced down at the dizzying landscape below, then they all joined him, searching for possible footholds. Ging pointed to a gentle waterfall cascading down the cliff wall "We can go there, enter the waterfall cave and basically take a shortcut to ground, or we can hitch a quick ride."

“Don’t tell me."

"Yeah, this." Ging pointed up to one of the massive, brown mega-birds that have been circling the sky above them. "They're still just building nests, so they aren't as aggressive. We'll just hop on one and let it drop us near the lake." He turned to Cheadle. "It's up to you."

She remained silent for a moment, following the birds with her eyes, downing the rest of her coffee. "No, and we won't climb down the cliff face either." She said. "We haven't followed the arthropods to their nest, and if shiols are growing here it means there's something they feed on. The spread and range of their roots suggest a big colony with sub-branches, too. I don't want to waste this opportunity." She smiled. "Let's just rest some more and eat for now. If we come out of the cavern and the birds are still around, we'll take the ride to the lake."

Back to the damp darkness, then.

This time, they didn't go swimming back down to the flooded chamber, but chose a winding, twisted path that branched from the domed chamber and lead down through a chaotic, tricky staircase of shaky ledges, crumbling stone and deceptive footholds, spiraling in a never ending descent, the dying mycelium roots leaving traces of light along the way, pale and shriveled but still clinging with stubborn filaments to the wet, slippery walls.

"Was it wise to leave some stuff behind?" Pariston asked, this time in the lead, his feet hopping from one stone to the next, his arms keeping him balanced in this dizzyingly long tube, less narrow than the ones they'd crossed but no less suffocating.

"It's better that way," Ging said. "I don't want what happened in the flooded chute to happen again."

Yeah, how his bag was going to block both Pariston and Cheadle from moving forward, how it almost sunk them down for a hot minute.

Now, their most important items were the coffee (of course) and the nitrogen tank, this time strapped to Cheadle instead of him. They kept her bag and the food and discarded everything else, filling their pockets with whatever they could, and Pariston made sure to keep the little jam jar on him, safe in his jacket's pocket, wrapped in an extra layer of cotton for protection. It was part of the mission now, and the whole time, he couldn't stop thinking of Don.

Last time he was around here, Pariston didn't actually get to meet the man, because Ging didn't, either, and meeting Don himself—the legendary Ur-Hunter, the Seirin founder, the infamous author—wasn't Ging's main goal; the man's allegedly unfinished travelogue novel was.

Don was a side dish, to Ging, and back then, in that expedition, in the shit puddles and swamps of new settlers, of militaristic excursions and aristocratic panic, very little had gone the way anyone expected.

It was a deliciously chaotic time, rife with possibilities, and yet the only thing Pariston had managed to wrench out of it was his life, intact, and a promise. He hadn't lost his soul or body to this land, the way numerous others did; it hadn't consumed him and spat him out. He survived it long enough and well enough to still come back to it, and in his first visit he knew he wasn’t going to die, but he also didn’t know that Cheadle was going to clamp down on him like a cannibalistic plant the second he stopped paying attention, or that he was going to live in her dark entrails for a very long time.

Yet if there was one thing he regretted, it was that he hadn't walked into that landmine willingly, a landmine she so painstakingly set up. No, Cheadle had exploited a small, regrettable misstep, and tripped him into it, held him by the neck, at once dangling him over death and sparing his life, because, more than anything, more than her sense of justice or her righteous drive to protect others from his hubris, she wanted to humiliate him. And she did.

Don Freecs could be any number of things, but if he were the key to payback, even a little piece of it, Pariston wanted him.

He looked up at her, her foot a ledge over his hand, the monitor around her ankle reflecting a speck of light. Did it itch her like it itched him, a burn that never quite heals?

"What is it?" She stared at him, her pretty green eyes searching his face the way they always do. "Is something wrong?"

Pariston smiled. "We've reached a landing."

She urged him forward with a jab of her chin. "Go on then."

He did, his feet finally touching continuous ground. He looked around in the darkness, then reached for his flashlight, shining a spot over their heads where once again the arthropods gathered, jittering and chirring in a unified, blind hoard. Except these ones were bigger, and meaner.

The flashlight glow that barely registered on the other hoard's sensory radar appeared quite irksome to this patch. They moved about, ebbing and flowing in place, a suspended wave of anxious anticipation, waiting for the intruding, bigger organism to make the first move, and there were so many of them they blocked the path ahead.

With a helpless sigh, Pariston turned back to his companions and bug nerds. "What now?"

Cheadle and Ging landed beside him in the domed tunnel, and wasted no time looking around for other routes, but there was only one.

"We just walk among them."

"Pardon?"

Ging shrugged. "Even if I wanted to burn them all, which I don't, the torches are still wet and won't take fire. We could use nen, but that'll just make them hostile. They already don't like us here. You kill one of these a hundred burst from the walls. Is that a scenario you prefer?"

The back of Pariston's shoulders tingled in revulsion. He glanced at Cheadle for a counter, saner opinion, but she just shrugged. "Just keep your mouth closed."

Of course they wouldn't want to kill the damn bugs. Pariston felt a little resentful.

"Ready whenever you are." Ging said. "Hold your breath and walk steadily, don't steer off course and don't try to shake them off if they cling to you. Got it?"

"Want to go ahead together, Pariston?" Cheadle put a hand to his back, and pushed him forward, not awaiting an answer.

What was stronger, disgust or fear? He's only ever felt one of them.

Pariston took one big step, eyes wide open, and waded through the moving curtain of frenzied bugs, Cheadle a complete shadow at his side.

He came out the other end, miraculously fast, out of his skin, one bug or two or ten stuck to his head and hands. When Cheadle shortly followed suit, he bent down to let her extract them from his hair while he shook the rest off his hands.

Once done, she stuck them in a couple of her vials, where they helplessly tried to climb the slippery glass walls of their tight prison.

It's only after a moment that Pariston felt it, the stinging, hot sensation in his hands that he expected. He got bitten.

"Why did none stick to you or bite you?" He asked, knowing the answer.

Cheadle looked up from her unfurled leather roll to his eyes. " _Zetsu_."

Ging arrived to their silence, pulled a bug out of his collar and chucked it back to its brethren, then their eyes found his, and all three of them just stared at one another in a short moment of mutual understanding.

For a while, the three sat on relatively dry ground while Cheadle tended to his hands. The bites spread over his knuckles and fingers like hot pink, ridged, four-eyed buttons, and the longer he stared at them the grosser they looked. She stuck a long, thin needle in each bite, at the little red center, and drew blood. Inside the syringe, his blood swirled with tiny dark impurities. Cheadle inserted the needle through the cap of a little white bottle, drew a translucent liquid through it which at first mixed seamlessly with his blood then started separating from it until a clear demarcation formed between the two. Cheadle inserted that needle back in his hands, and injected him with the new liquid, little, measured doses in each bite.

Pariston met Ging’s eyes. The latter was never going to say anything about it because he considered it none of his business, but he understood the situation well enough to know that sooner or later, Pariston was going to become more of a liability than an asset. Similarly, the sooner Cheadle realizes how his nenlessness slows and hinders them, the better, and Pariston wasn’t going to waste any opportunity to show her just that, even if it meant hurting himself, over and over again.

She will realize he's doing it on purpose, and perhaps she already did, but that wouldn't make a difference.

His stinging hands limp in hers, she pressed the pads of her fingers over the bite marks, then she drew them away. Strings of blood began trickling out of each puncture. Pariston stared down at it all as she held both of his wrists in a tight, blood-draining grip, the tips of his fingers brushing her palms, and he watched the veins bulge in his hands, then they went blue and numb. Cheadle didn't let go.

"Is that a general anti-coagulant you used?" Ging asked her, holding her leather roll between his hands like unspooled yarn, inspecting the small bottles that lined the inside, the needles and threads and scalpels. Her tools were enough to perform a small operation.

Cheadle nodded, not moving her eyes away from his hands. "I don't have anything specific for these bugs," she answered, but was addressing Pariston instead of Ging. "But this will stop any venom from reaching your heart. Does it hurt?"

"It's fine," Pariston said, then chuckled. "This feels like some religious blood-letting ritual."

The winding threads of blood that streamed down between his knuckles and burrowed in the grooves of his skin and down his fingers had begun to dribble down Cheadle's hands, too. A drop of blood hung precariously to her inner wrist, and fell.

"Does it?"

"Why aren't they labeled?" Ging asked again, still studying the drug bottles she's decided to bring along. "Don't want anybody else to use them?"

"I don't want the wrong people to use them."

"You tell them apart by smell?" His nose was curiously sniffing one.

"And careful placement—stop opening each one to smell it." She admonished him. "Some lose potency by exposure to air."

Ging closed the bottles tightly and returned them to where they had been, and Cheadle observed him to make sure he returned each bottle to its original place. Once he was done, Ging stood up again to look around.

The chamber they found themselves in was relatively spacious but low ceilinged, and had numerous exits, some that led down, others up, and others yet that extended straight ahead to absolute darkness. Everywhere around them, insects crawled in and out of holes and burrows.

Ging was searching for the lost trail of mycelium, his eyes seizing on the crumbs of dead bugs. He walked with slow, measured steps towards the mouth of one tunnel, and for a moment, disappeared into it. They could still hear his footsteps.

"Do you know that in the warrior culture of the Yurwa mountain tribes of Northern Gutedel, a wedding ceremony is opened with blood-letting by the groom and bride," Pariston said. She didn't answer with anything, letting him continue while she pulled out a roll of gauze from an inside breast pocket. "The soon-to-be spouses cut each other’s palms open, and hold hands, their blood, now one, drips into a bowl that's then mixed with fresh goat milk, vanilla beans and brown sugar, then everyone in the wedding drinks it."

Cheadle made a face, but she was entertained by the details of this ritual. "Did _you_ drink it?"

"No," Pariston shook his head. "Colonialist families weren't allowed to participate in indigenous ceremonies, but they used to let children watch. How's your arm now?"

"It's okay, it was just a scratch." She said, and started wrapping his fingers and hands with the light gauze. "Your hands will probably sting for a while. You won't be able to use them for a couple hours, at worst, luckily."

Done, she finally looked up at him, the line of her lips firm, her gaze hard and sharp, staring into the depths of his eyes. Pariston stared back, his hands still held in hers, their faces so close to each other they shared a breath.

"Don't do that again."

"How else am I gonna receive your kindness?"

Her grip around his wrists grew considerably stronger, the gentleness with which she held them only a second ago replaced with punitive force. His shoulders tightened in pain.

Did she see him, when he grabbed Ging's injured leg in pretty much the same way?

Pariston smiled at the shaky, cruel gleam in her eyes. "You're hurting me."

Without breaking her gaze for a second, Cheadle let go.

"I found your flamboyant fungi for you," Ging reappeared out of the dark tunnel, still wholly intact.

Cheadle’s eyes sought him instantly, her entire expression changing. "You did? Are you sure they're alive?"

"Yeah," Ging said. "But you're gonna have to go there alone."

**III**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who read this far. Any and all feedback is greatly appreciated.
> 
> The rest of this story will come when it comes.


	10. Xenophile Goes to Dinner

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fucking your colleagues is a bad idea, but the sexy kind of bad idea.

The three of them stood before an imposing wall, a solid rock barrier at the end of a tunnel, its surface grainy and pebbled, casting towards them in the darkness a brilliant shaft of blue light through a narrow fissure two feet off the ground that cut horizontally through the wall like a disembodied, demented grin. The fissure itself a crooked, slightly lopsided arch that grew narrower the closer to the other end, about seven meters in length from one side of the wall to the other.

"That's what you meant by me going alone, huh." Cheadle said, already starting to shed the little left on her to the ground.

"Are you sure you want to go in?" Ging asked. But he didn’t mention finding another way to the fungi colony, because there weren’t any.

Apparently he'd tried fitting himself through the crack, and he could drag himself on his back but only for part of the way. He'd risk getting stuck the moment he crossed the three and a half-meter point. There was simply not enough space to accommodate him.

Cheadle had managed to squash her claustrophobia for a good part of this junket to the depths of the cave, and even a refresher on the mental map she's been drawing of their progress within the annals of the cavern was enough to fill her with quiet but persistent dread. Now she was gonna have to go alone, pass through a terribly tight fissure where she might very well get stuck, in a wall that already threatened to fall down on them, and explore the area beyond on her own. Ging and Pariston weren't terribly good company, but they were _her_ company, and she was getting used to being with them. Still, that fluorescent, vivacious light—she’s reached her fungi.

Nothing in the world could make her go back, not even dealing with the worst of her claustrophobia on her own.

"I'm going through, head first," she turned to them, started taking off her jacket. "I'll crawl on my back. When I'm on the other side, pass me my stuff." She bent down to untie her boots, then she tapped herself down to get rid of anything that might weigh her down or hinder her movement or simply fall off her on the way there. She gave up her wrist watch, the map, vials, bandages, a flashlight, a travel-sized sewing kit, then another layer of clothes, shedding her shirt and cargo pants, leaving with them another flashlight, a ziplock of syringes, and—she's forgotten about this—extra shoelaces, and then replaced some items in her leather roll with others, securing everything she will need inside it.

At the end, she stood in the cold, humid tunnel barefoot and clad only in a tank top and loose cotton underpants.

"You were wearing two pants this whole time?" Pariston laughed.

"Yeah, you never know," she shrugged, even though she felt self-conscious in her training cotton getup. "You might get bitten, or walk through thorns, or catch fire."

"Or need a place for your comically tiny sewing kit," Ging said, holding up said kit and shaking it. He grinned. "It's cute. I'm stealing it."

"Fine, but you'll be sewing my clothes."

"Sure."

Cheadle took a breath and let it out, needing a moment to psych herself, then she squatted, trying to determine the best way and angle to enter, her arms reaching inside the crevice to feel up the low ceiling, passing her palms over the grainy rock. There was a place to push her legs through and slip her body inside. With half her body squeezed inside, she gave the other two a resolute last look. "Don't tickle my feet. Oh, and take off my glasses."

"There goes our plan," Pariston sighed, drawing her glasses off her faces. "A bad day for the near-sighted, isn't it."

"Tell us what you see in there." Ging said as the two squatted beside her suspended head.

Cheadle nodded, and began her lonely journey through the fracture in the wall, arms firmly at her sides, using her shoulders and the soles of her feet to move forward, or was it backward?

The ceiling was so close to her face, and this time she didn't have water to sink her head in whenever she felt the rocks above pressing down on her. She couldn't move her head at all lest she gets jabbed in the eye with any of the jutting points of the rock surface, most of which she couldn't even see, but still every time she dragged herself on her back, the pebbly stone above scratched her nose and forehead, and the hard, jagged ground under pressed hard against her back.

Her breathing grew heavier, her skin clammier, and even in this situation where yet again she had to give up her glasses momentarily, she didn't use _Gyo_. Cheadle has been pumping aura to her eyes almost non-stop for hours, and that continuous concentration of nen into one body part, and one as sensitive as the eye, didn't come without side effects. Her head became heavier, and a blurry dizziness was circling her temples, only the watery blue glow seeping from the other side keeping her from stopping.

Cheadle felt herself on the edge of panic, one foot on unspooling ground the other hanging precariously over a black void, and every time she sensed, sickly, something sharp or grainy against her ankles or palms or neck she had to swallow back the fear climbing up her throat. There was still time to pull her hanging leg back to a somewhat safer spot. She can still crawl backward.

But she neither did that nor did she go on. When the back of her head grazed the obtruding, askew rock that marked the midpoint of the fissure path, she came to a total halt.

All at once, that specific, old fear spilled out of her.

Her breathing erratic and jagged and getting worse, Cheadle froze, felt trapped and suffocated, and even though the rational part of her brain insisted that she knows the way, that she could tilt her body a little to the left and continue moving, that she could actually get out, her body refused to cooperate, pinning her in place, trembling, its reins not in the grip of her hand but the cavity that was going to swallow her, fall on her, choke her to death.

The dark, dark kitchen cellar, the secret tunnel under the house, the school’s discipline room, the closet under the stairs, the closet in the hallway.

Fuck. She can't do this she couldn't do it she couldn't do anything nothing will get her out of here.

She gritted her teeth, coiled her fingers over indifferent stones and pebbles and dirt, pain gripping her chest, desperate to close her eyes but what if she missed something what if she opened them again to nothingness.

"Cheadle,"

She blinked.

"Cheadle!"

Her name again. And again.

"Are you okay? Say something."

_No I'm not okay I want out of here I want to get out please get me out._

But Martine or Nyssa or madam Lizavita weren't here to get her out there was no one here to get her out to open the door or unlock the closet or lift the heavy metal lid off the dark, dark kitchen cellar.

Her name, again, not her name. She heard it, and then she could hear the beating of her heart again.

"Ging?"

"Yeah!"

"Are you still there?" She screamed.

"Yeah we're right here."

She willed her breathing into a normal rhythm, her heart back to a steady beat. Her body betrayed her.

"Are you scared?"

His voice again. Him. The only person she trusted.

"Yeah..." her voice trembled, broken. "Yeah I'm scared!"

"Need me to get you out?" Get her out? How would he get her out? No, no. "Didn't you say we'll smash our way through if we have to?"

A nervous sound escaped her chest. She did. They can destroy it. They can destroy it all.

But no.

"I want to continue!" She yelled, her words in defiance of every fiber in her being. "I want those stupid shiols goddamit."

The distant sound of his chuckling reached her. "Alright! Just breathe, and move slowly."

"And think of a sunny place!"

Pariston. Cheadle wished she could look at them, but no matter how much she strained her eyeballs trying to look down, only the bony mounds of her knees made any physical sense, and little by little, sensation returned to them, and seeped to the rest of her body.

No, she wasn't trapped, and there were no doors to unlock or lids to lift or tunnels to prove she’s brave—there was only the glowing chamber on the other side.

Cheadle dragged her head left of the jutting rock, and continued moving, her right shoulder scraping against the hard edges of the rock while the rest of her body stretched off kilter over a wall as she squeezed herself through the narrowest point in the crevice.

Once finally, _finally_ out of that death trap, Cheadle was filled with so much relief she wanted to sob.

"There you are." Ging again.

She laughed in her fear. "Yeah!"

Only a little more to the end, to the blue, all-encompassing light, and she never imagined just how magnificent this chamber she persevered to reach was.

Her head and torso out of the wall crack, Cheadle stared upside down at the scene that surrounded her panoramically from all sides, even the wall she was currently dangling from, hooking her calves to the edge to keep herself from falling to the water pond below.

"Are you safe?"

"Yeah! It's..." she trailed, not knowing how to describe what her exhausted eyes took in. "It's beautiful."

An organic, massive, overarching gazebo of live, thriving fungi made up the bulk of the chamber, climbing every inch of the walls, spurting out of the water to colonize every nook and cranny, every surface from floor to ceiling, every rut and groove where their discerning, ever-expanding roots can latch, growing one over the other like giant, dangerous jellyfish in a magical, surreal shade of blue, filaments cascading down from the ceiling in locks of long white hair, lending the pond in the chamber's center a gleaming, illusory color, every individual fungus reflected in it perfectly, a mirror from which they spurted and surged forth, the mother they inevitably devour, always, without fail.

In the untouched majesty of this terraced, upturned chandelier of a colony, thousands of arthro pods hung, trapped, little more than scattered, thorny black dots in the entrails of waves upon waves of blue and white expansion, some food, some surrogates.

And those little creatures were no longer the only prey here. Every tendril and root felt her presence.

Cheadle pulled her torso up, calves still tethering her to the crevice, and tried to make out the two distant faces on the other end.

"How is it?" Ging yelled, his voice echoing through the walls.

"It's brilliant, it's better than I imagined!" Cheadle yelled back. "The chamber is massive, could be domed but I'm not sure, it's all covered with shiols. There's a center pond, and dead bugs everywhere. I don't see any exit." She glanced at the chamber then back at them. _I wish you two could be with me_ , she thought, but she didn't say it. "Pass me my stuff, please."

The precious leather roll came flying at her so fast it almost smacked her straight in the face. She caught it with both hands but the force of the throw reeled her back. "There's glass in here!"

"Do you want it stuck inside the crack?" Ging cried out. "It was a supremely good throw, you should've seen it from our side."

“It was!” Pariston laughed.

Of course he bragged. Jerk.

"I'm going down now!" She said, strapping the roll to her chest. "We probably won't hear one another very well past this point."

Once again she turned to this grand chandelier chamber, and gave it a long once over, mapping every adequate foothold and safe spot, drawing a mental path between her position on the wall and that hopefully sturdy rock in the pond.

Cheadle dangled even farther down, now only the soles of her feet holding her steady, the ends of her hair waving dangerously over a cluster of shiols. One flip, a jump, another, a ledge to hold, a somersault in the narrow clear path to the pool where a shallow creek of water flowed, and then finally the pool rock.

There was an alternate route too, but that was for later. She let go.

Standing on the rock—and it proved shaky like she suspected—Cheadle took a good look around her, more or less at the center of the chamber, at the center of a trap, at the mouth of a fountain sprouting long threads of white hair. She glanced down at the sheet of water under her feet, at her crystal clear reflection in it, at the hundreds of mycelium filaments that were creeping up on her, canopying over her head, swaying like loose strings, surrounding her like a picture frame.

"Hello, boys."

They shook ever so slightly, feeling the air around her, sensing her aura, studying her sudden presence among them.

She didn't move, indulging them in their tentative curiosity, in the way they seemed to patiently discern her intentions. If she moved too much or made too much noise they'll be more interested. If this colony was smaller they wouldn't have been so forward in exploring her presence. The bigger the colony the stronger and bolder it was, more willing to sacrifice members in exchange for sustenance and expansion.

Yet something disconcerted her about this very thought. The strength and abundance of the fungi, the unusual expansion of a colony in an ecologically impoverished spot. They couldn't just be feeding on those bugs, because they would have been dead a long time ago, just like their brethren in other chambers that found their spores disseminating in blocked roads and dead ends.

That was the thing about this creature. In its obligate parasitism, it had no agency in movement, and at times its host failed to carry it successfully, as most often happened. It thrived through an intermediate level of expansion, not too widespread but powerful and terribly difficult to extinguish once successful colonization took roots.

Its evolutionary strategy operated through throwing everything at a wall and hoping something sticks.

No, they weren't just sustaining themselves on those bugs.

"Well, aren't you just very special." She smiled up at the flailing tendrils of mycelium that floated above her, now more of them snaking to her sides to inspect.

Using nen wasn't optional anymore. They were hungry, and ready to fight.

Cheadle's nen swirled around her, coating her in a protective layer that repelled and alarmed them. The shiols didn't like her aura at all, flinching back, contracting their tentacles closer to their fleshy bodies.

A little out of her way, Cheadle jumped off the rock and to the bank, shadowed by the white tendrils; quickly she bent down, picked a few stones, infused them with her nen and tossed them in five different directions, sending the tendrils on a wild chase away from her.

Shrouded in _Zetsu_ , Cheadle stood face to face with a pulsing wall of heavy shiols, big translucent blue bags about to burst at the slightest touch.

She poked one, it jiggled.

The body was basically useless when it came to hunting or feeding. As long as she was far away from the tentacles and roots, she was safe.

Standing so close to them, Cheadle recognized that their size and number most likely hid just how massive the chamber was, as the wall of shiols before her concealed behind it another curtain of fungi, and so on. She could wade through them, and wanted to. The healthiest ones were the backstage individuals, the ones that grew silently in the darkness, older and sturdier and much better well-fed, the closest as they were to a host or several.

She only had three glass vials with her. She had to choose wisely. With a careful, gentle hand, Cheadle pushed a dangling branch of shiols aside, and entered deeper into the colony, its labyrinthine entrails sucking her in, luring her deeper, blue as everything that had once existed and never did, a blue only real in books and dreams.

_What were you thinking, Clarence? What was going on in your mind? Just what did you bring to the settlement?_

Cheadle pulled out a surgical knife from her leather roll, and cut a shiol at the base, severing it from its kin who all moved subtly, as if murmuring among themselves. She took a vial and gently nudged the fungus into it, covering the lid with gauze to keep the shiol breathing. She was going to need water, too, the same water they spread their roots in. But that's for later.

A step after another, Cheadle waded deeper among the shiols, and glancing back could no longer see the way from which she came in. She was lost in a giant maze of suspended teardrops, and the longer she gazed at the endless blue of them the more her head reeled, the more their magic wore off.

There was no wall or end, no back or front, and she recognized it might very well be a visual trick, a side effect of monotonous scenery.

She pushed her way through, the canopies growing ever thicker and heavier, and yet again, she chose one, cut it, preserved it.

Then her bare, cold toes touched something soft and gooey.

Instantly she looked down, then took a step back in alarm, the exhale she was about to let out now trapped inside her chest.

A human foot.

Cheadle stood, frozen, staring wide-eyed at this new discovery, at the sickly, pallid green of decaying, rotting toes, at the long, yellow, serrated nails, the protruding yet mellow joints.

It was like a whole person was hiding behind a curtain in a game of hide and seek and had missed concealing their foot.

Slowly, gingerly, she grabbed the side of the shiols canopy and pulled it aside.

A wall, and a disembodied leg.

Human flesh sticking to stone, in various states of putrefaction, cleaved apart along the lower knee and tibia, its cavity swarming with little, pulsing shiols, their roots digging wantonly in rotting muscle and skin, replacing the body's natural nerve endings.

Cheadle looked up, and saw the rest of this unfortunate body, torn apart by an aggressive, sturdy network of feeding tentacles, an arm hanging between the white threads, dry and shriveled, at the end of its purpose, giving birth to hundreds of new colony members.

Morbidly, she thought, that if she could find the head, she would take it.

But she couldn't. Instead, she found more human bodies, all headless, suspended over her, weighing nothing at all, their limbs and torsos barely held together, the little bit of skin left of them speaking of no features, no past, no self.

Over her, slightly above her line of vision, dangled a severed hand, boney, gray, and beringed

If she outstretched her arm, Cheadle could hold it

The ring—a simple engagement ring, pure gold, slickly-made but largely unremarkable, and carved with a language Cheadle didn't understand—had clung to the skin like a foot in mud, sunken into it, tiny shiols budding around it, threatening to displace it or slough it off its rightful place.

Her knife cut through the tendrils, once ravenous and now bored with a depleted resource, they gave way easily, and the fungoid hand fell into the vial she held under it, except for the index finger, already misshapen, which dropped outside the vial mouth, dangled over the glass, wooden, pointing eternally to something only it saw.

Cheadle broke the hollowed bone, and stuffed it in.

Who were these people? How did they arrive into this cavern, this chamber? Were they cave divers and if so, did they all belong to the same group? Every single body was itself in various states of rot and disintegration and occupation, like some parts of it had died before others—some way before others—so that it was difficult to tell the old from the new, whether they were recent victims or decade-old leftovers.

What did they see or feel in their last moments? She knew their death wasn't a quick or merciful one. Most likely, these people had lived long enough to see their bodies wasting, invaded and planted, perhaps carriers of spores for way longer than they knew. Or somebody had beheaded and tossed them here as food. She didn't know which was worse.

Cheadle turned a dozen different ideas in her head, away from curious, probing tendrils, for now, for only a moment in time, yet still, sensed herself watched, observed, hunted.

Shiols don't use land mammals as surrogates to grow their spores, or so the research so far has concluded. Could this strange, gruesome encounter be a breakthrough in studies of this organism? And if it was so, was this particular colony a genus offshoot, a descendant of older shiols that relied solely on marine life to propagate themselves? Did the shiols adapt to the presence of new prey represented by humans, powerful and fast and durable, thus lending it a better chance at survival and dispersal? Did a strain of this fungus evolve to parasitize sexually on land wildlife?

And why all headless if the head did not appear crucial for the birth of new colony members? If this act of seemingly systemic decapitation was indeed the work of reproducing shiols and not something, or someone, else, then where were the heads? Were they the quickest to be inseminated then consumed? How did these people enter this place, a supposed anomalous, geographical transmogrification that more often than not disappears? Were these shifts recurring, were places and areas like this cavern pre-set, always reappearing the same, perhaps in different regions around the continent, luring people in, digesting them only to spit their remains elsewhere? Were these topographical alterations, in and of themselves, living, breathing organisms—predators, simply moving every now and then to hunt? Were the shiols operating as part of a vast digestive system?

And then there was another idea. Creatures that reproduce often and in great numbers could be cultured extensively in labs where they are made to evolve into certain habits and proclivities. A subset of fruit flies was grown and taught, generation after generation, and in an incredibly short span of time, to detect blood and be drawn to it—even bleached blood—so as to be used in criminal investigations. A breed of sea worms evolved in labs to eat plastic, others to absorb radiation. Certain plants were spurred by particular, deliberate cultivation methods to produce better fruit, or withstand low temperatures, or repel preying insects. Why couldn't a strain of shiols be the same? And she already had evidence that pointed to an experiment which had been conducted on and with them.

Cheadle looked around her. It was time to get out.

Finding her way back and out from the entrails of the colony proved just as difficult and tricky as she expected. Going back the same route was near impossible, because she couldn't tell where she stood or how she came to stand in this exact spot. She had followed the trail of food, of condemned humans, and she had reached a dead-end.

A dead-end. Cheadle stopped.

This chamber should have, for all reasons and purposes, been a dead-end for the fungus. If the shiols, which, as far as they knew, relied for sexual reproduction on marine wildlife were in this instance, in this chamber, feeding on humans and arthropods and using the former to breed, growing exponentially still with no signs at all of malnutrition, why such a shallow pool? Shouldn't it have depleted by now? Shouldn't they have sucked it dry?

Moreover, why such a disadvantageous habitat with a relatively useless water resource that contained basically nothing with which they could further their continuous survival and spread their genes? If her theory about them being a new strain—naturally evolved or deliberately cultured—wasn't correct, then those humans must have arrived here through swimming in some water path that had long since been depleted, new creatures that perhaps managed to confuse the fungi into thinking they were big fish, and all this human feeding and breeding was simply an anomaly, like a particularly hungry lion attacking a human, a fellow animal it otherwise wouldn't pursue for food.

This whole encounter, Cheadle thought, was an anomaly. If she couldn't find another shiols colony that feeds on and uses humans or any other land mammals for reproduction, then she wouldn't be able to really prove anything, and this instance would remain an extraordinary case.

Just what kind of door did she open here?

Cheadle dropped her _Zetsu_ , and soon enough the preying tendrils she'd sensed earlier started creeping back to the prize they were cheated out of, making their presence much more known, some forgoing the ground to rise up around her, some slithering close to her bare feet, a tight, competitive snake pit. She could use them to get out.

They lunged at her. Cheadle leapt away and plunged into a canopy of trembling shiols, fending off even more tentacles as they swarmed around her in waves. She grabbed every strand of them, pushing some, cutting others, using them like hanging ropes to swing herself forward. The longest and thickest tendrils belonged to the oldest individuals, which occupied the borders and the back rows of the colony, while the newer members grew closer to the water, their filaments shorter and thinner. She followed those, trying along the way to keep damage to a minimum, but a hasty slash of her nen at a tendril that was shooting straight for her face caused a whole canopy to dislodge from its secure place.

A couple shiols fell, tendrils hung down, ceiling roots, slowly tearing, barely holding the immense weight under them, snapped. The entire canopy fell.

Then, like dominos, one followed the other.

Cheadle's heart skipped a beat, and for a moment, everything became a blur of roiling, crashing blue and white.

Samples strapped so tightly to her chest like the rarest of all things, she bolted from under a chaotic wave of loose shiols that was about to emblanket her whole, and zipped past unfurling curtains and bursting fungi and white, flailing strings, and finally she could see the icy blue of the pond, the dark brown of the rocks, and she reached for it, for the strip of central land that was about to roil under the weight of thousands upon thousands of falling fungi.

_Don't forget the water._

Cheadle ran so close to the ground her hands would have touched it if they weren't hugging the samples to her chest, but she had to let go, momentarily, prancing among fallen shiols, stepping on some, unfastening her sample vials from the roll and screeching to a halt beside the pool to fill them with water.

Funny, how the fissure in the wall she believed was going to kill her only a couple hours ago seemed to her now like the safest place on Earth.

With hands full and occupied with rescuing her loot, she kicked and dodged her way back to that imposing, smooth wall, and jumped as high as she could, managing to get ahold of the crack ledge with clammy fingers.

A little safer now, away from the worst of the carnage, Cheadle halted to catch back her breath, and turned around to witness this once glorious chandelier come apart one crystal after another.

Her solace was that the shiols here weren't going to die, not because of this structural collapse, anyway, grief because she might never find this place again.

How can anybody study an area and its organisms if it appeared, disappeared, and reappeared at a seemingly incomprehensible whim of its own?

Cheadle sighed, and glanced inside the fissure. They were shining a light for her at the other end. She smiled and went in.

The seven meter trip through the crevice wasn't as scary or as unsurmountable but no less hard to traverse, especially with sensitive material strapped to her. She dragged herself, glided on the hard rock ground, then reached that suffocating midpoint again.

She stopped, took a breath, another, and closed her eyes. Every time she was stuck in a dark, tight, scary place, someone always came to get her out. Someone always found her.

"Guys?" She called out nervously.

"Still here!" Pariston shouted back. "Terribly cold and hungry, really should have brought a deck of cards with us."

She chuckled. "I'm on my way!"

When her head popped out the other end, and she was met with their curious, smiling faces staring down at her, Cheadle felt so childishly overjoyed she could have kissed both of them.

Even when she spoke, she was still yelling in excitement. "I have so many things to share! Get me out of this miserable hell hole."

They dragged her out and she flopped on the ground between them, clutching the samples to her chest.

"You've been there for five hours." Ging said.

Her eyes widened. "What?"

He lifted her watch. "We kept track of time."

"Why didn't you call for me?"

"We did," Pariston answered. "You just never answered, so we assumed you've waded pretty deep in."

Her eyes wandered between them, confused. "I did get lost, but it barely felt like any time had passed at all. I thought I was there for only about an hour or two." She furrowed her brows. "What did you two do this whole time?"

Pariston placed a bandaged finger to his chin. "Tried on your glasses to see whose eyesight is worse."

"For five hours?"

"There was far more amateur optometry discussed than you'd imagine."

Ging scoffed. "He waited for you in case you came out and I went exploring to find a path out of here." He handed her back her glasses. "After we tried on your glasses. Can you believe his eyesight is better than mine?"

"And did you find a path out of here?" She wore back her most trusted object, and blinked for the first time without _Gyo_ and without her world turning into a smudge.

He smiled and returned her watch to her. "Of course I did."

Carefully she laid down the leather roll on the ground, unfurled it while they sat around her, and revealed her modest—but carefully selected—loot. "Here's what I found."

"Is that a human hand?" Ging asked, picking up the vial to inspect it, a thing that seemed to only win a glance from Pariston whose hands instantly and wantonly sought the brilliantly blue fungi.

The two of them stared long at their respective vials, eyes fixated on the little details of each thing they contained, then Pariston deigned to look over at the vial in Ging's hands, where his eyes widened.

"Is that a ring?" He asked, putting the shiols down and reaching excitedly with his hands to the other vial. Ging gave it up only reluctantly.

Pariston stared long and hard at the dirty, contaminated engagement ring, his gaze merciless in assessing its attributes, its condition, its worth, its true nature. Cheadle almost forgot that Pariston made his bones as a Hunter with this kind of work. He only hunted criminals on the side (and ones who specifically stole art), more interested in finding antiques, rare jewelry, textiles and old furniture. When they first met, he introduced himself to her—his smile wide, his hand exactly the right temperature—as an antiquarian. The Hunter Index on the Association website listed him as an 'art historian', which was a very pompous way of calling him 'someone who loves pretty and shiny things', but that didn't mean he wasn't devilishly good and fast at telling a fake painting from an authentic one, or an expensive piece of junk from its obscure progenitor.

After a minute or two of visual inspection, Pariston shifted his gaze to her. "I can't take it out now, right?"

"I'll give it to you when all the samples are safe in the lab." She said.

On their way out of the tunnel, Cheadle thought back to the dead, suspended human bodies in that chamber. She looked at Pariston. "Do you think that ring, and the hand thereof, might have belonged to somebody on the ship?"

"Possibly," he said. "It's decent gold but it's quite a commoner's ring, and don't forget the ship is a cruiser where the obscenely wealthy were out to vacay. It’s expensive, but not their kind of expensive. None of them would wear that, not in front of kith and kin. _I_ wouldn't. If it belonged to somebody on the ship it would’ve been one of the crew members."

"Did you see something similar to it in the ship, Ging?"

He took a moment to think. "There's a lot of jewelry in there, but I don't remember a similar ring. We can look again, once we're back."

"What if it belonged to some of the vanished scientists?" Pariston asked.

Cheadle shook her head. "None of them came here engaged. Part of their selection process involved eliminating candidates with solid connections outside their prisons, people who visited often and made frequent phone calls." She said, something about the cruelty of all that setting in her chest. "They were basically chosen because, presumably, there would be nobody to miss them if they're gone, or wait for them."

"Not a scientist then, but maybe a soldier," Ging said. "Some of them have disappeared too."

"Could be, I can investigate it." Pariston smiled, no doubt his budding connection with Twen already giving him ideas. "I still want to read the carved words on the ring, but don't get your hopes up for some awesome mystery reveal; it'll probably just be some cliché romantic phrase."

Moreover, she thought, soldiers, wealthy vacationers and their crew weren't the only human pools on which those shiols could prey. There were rogue groups like the gerontologists, others like the one Samion's family belonged to, not to mention scattered gangs of war-hardened raiders who still roamed the continent.

Speculating on the person behind the ring was a fun endeavor, but one she believed to be far from a priority. She only chose that hand because she couldn't possibly fit a foot or an arm in a vial.

"It's Iwanese gold." Pariston said confidently.

"How can you know that?"

He shrugged. "It has a certain shine."

"Then it belonged to somebody on the ship?"

"Just because Ritwik was Iwanese doesn't mean everybody there was," Pariston said. "Considering how these cruise journeys are usually planned, I'd argue the passenger rolodex must've had a pretty international character." Then he hummed. "Still, Iwanese gold is pretty common internationally because it's cheap and its extraction doesn't fall under many regulations, therefore we can't limit the suspects to the ship passengers."

"What if the ring was stolen?" Ging asked as they moved out of one tunnel into another. "Maybe that person didn't know or didn't care that it was an engagement ring. Also," he stopped to look at Pariston. "You said you wouldn't wear such a thing, but maybe that person would. Maybe they wore it specifically to draw attention to themselves, to differentiate themselves from the wealthier people on the ship."

"Yeah, out of spite." Cheadle added. "Or as a statement. Maybe the engagement was to somebody disreputable."

"And maybe the ring, perhaps along with the other one, were stolen by two or more scientists before they vanished," Ging said. "And an engagement happened here in the continent and long after leaving the settlement."

"It wouldn't clash with the records," Pariston agreed. "And we do know of a still-existing case of continental matrimony."

Cheadle nodded. "That's true, but it makes me curious why only one hand. Wouldn't two engaged people in such a place stick together? I searched and I found other hands but none of them with a ring, not even a different kind of jewelry."

And so, they continued this chain of speculation, a much less serious endeavor that kept them entertained along the dark paths of the cavern. Perhaps this had nothing to do with the ship or its passengers. It’s not like they were the only people to ever reach the continent, but the three of them had fun turning over that possibility in their collective mind. Maybe they did die together in there but Cheadle couldn't find a ring among the busy space. Maybe one of them had died in some other way, leaving their alleged fiancé with remaining group members. Maybe there's no 'two' but 'one', a single person who just liked to wear a pretty ring, stolen or owned for real. Then there was guessing about the gender of the person behind the severed hand, which lead to a long conversation about Iwanese engagement and wedding traditions, if the rings differed—in material, shape, carvings—between groom and bride (they did), if they were even a man and woman and not any other combination (very possible) and if so, was same-sex marriage even legal in Iwan (it wasn't), and would a bunch of rich people on a ship even care about it (only insofar as it hurt their interests) and moreover, perhaps an engagement ceremony was held on deck. Maybe the whole trip was just a lavish engagement party, but then why such a simple ring? If they were going to throw so much money at an entire ocean-themed engagement ceremony, why not go all the way, why not get one of those terribly ugly sapphire-studded melted-diamond gilded-silver rings? She'd seen that shit on some people's fingers. Pariston interjected that a ring of that value would have been stolen the moment those idiots set foot on land and encountered raiders; perhaps a simple gold ring was a pragmatic choice, or a performance of modesty.

All this, and for some reason, no matter how laughably outlandish and transparently fictitious their guesses and theories became, Cheadle stuck by her gut feeling, without sharing her thoughts, that there was some kind of inherent, emotional value in the ring being so simple, because, and maybe stupidly and naively, she wanted to believe in the romantic possibility, in the chance that no silly ship ceremony happened and that perhaps two people really were engaged and lost each other, or died together, and as for why she believed that gruesome death-cum-separation was in the least bit romantic wasn't something she dwelled on or questioned.

Finally, Ging stood in front of a domed tunnel where a gentle, cold wind current was passing. "This will lead us to the cliff face. It's a pretty straightforward path."

Little by little into this path, walking against the chilly wind wheezing and whooshing against the walls, a bit of orange light began appearing just around a corner. They picked up pace and eventually arrived at the other end of the tunnel, at an actual exit from the cavern, out to the open sky but farther away from Lake Harkenburg than they were on the nesting area of the mountain.

Cheadle sighed as they all stood at the edge of one of this cavern's many mouths, breathing new, rarified air, silhouetted by the beginning of a mesmerizing, watery sunset, the sun a gooey egg yolk slipping down the expansive orange sky.

"So," Pariston started, staring down the sheer cliff face, at how it stretched flatly and menacingly all the way down to the forest below. "Is the bird taxi still in the cards for us?"

"Yeah," Ging said, his feet balancing precariously on the last inch of the ledge as he stared up at the sky and the wall face over them. "I can hear them circling, but they won't come on their own." He grinned. "I'm gonna have to annoy them."

And annoy them he did. Out of the cavern mouth he climbed, disappeared for a good fifteen minutes, the only sign of him the unbearable bird shrieks and violent wing flapping that filled the air, followed by giant beige-colored feathers that swayed serenely in the air, then returned on the back of a terribly irritated mega-bird.

"Jump!"

They did, clutching the volatile bird's feathers and using them to climb up. Pariston lagged behind her.

Cheadle looked down at him. "Is it your hands?" Her voice sounded so loud yet lost so high up in the air.

Bandages a little bloody, grip weaker, he nodded. She slid down and offered him her hand. "Come on, I'll help you up!"

He took it and she dragged him up until they both fell face first on the bird's back, and had no incentive to get up. It was so goshdarn soft.

"How cool is this!" Ging laughed, standing like a lunatic on the bird's neck like it was his bitch. "I should do this more often."

Cheadle flipped on her back, clutching the feathers under her as the bird took a sharp glide down, the power and speed of its descent tossing her hair all over her face. She laughed and looked up at Ging. "Holy shit we're riding a giant bird."

He came to lay on the bird's back beside them, frigid wind whipping past, pink and orange clouds so close they could almost touch them, surrounded by an all-encompassing sunset.

The three of them sat in reverent, blissful silence, cold and hungry and a little wet, but exhilarated and terribly, beautifully alive. For a moment, Cheadle forgot all the awful things past and yet to come. For a moment, nothing really mattered.

Nearby, a little ahead, stretched out Lake Harkenburg, positively massive, its surface an emerald green flaked with sunset gold, situated in an ancient volcanic pit, surrounded on all sides by a wide, colossal expanse of forest and circled by protective slopes of solid volcanic rocks.

Even from their height, Cheadle could see animals drinking and gathering by the lake, tiny moving brown dots that accentuated an otherwise intimidating and forbidding natural expanse. Around them, too, all the abandoned human settlements.

"How do you know the bird's going in the right direction?" She asked Ging, sensing the bird turning somewhat east of the lake.

Ging pointed to the giant forests. "It's out to collect branches and twigs for its nest, so it'll pass over the lake." He smiled. "It's going where it needs to go, but it'll drop us where we want."

"Drop us?" Cheadle pushed her hair away from her face. "We're gonna jump down to the lake, aren't we?"

"Yep."

Pariston stared down at the encroaching lake, at the sheer height of a possible jump, his face adorned with a wry smile. He looked at her. "Better than getting stuck in a cave, no?"

Cheadle chuckled, taking off her glasses, securing them in a deep pocket. "Yeah."

"Strap your stuff to you," Ging said, standing up. "When the bird glides down and flies closer to the ground in a straight line, we jump."

Standing, tickled up to their faces with billowing feathers, the three watched the ground grow closer, trees and animals coming into clearer view, the sky above them dimming, and when the bird glided down and spread its massive wings to their full length to carry it over the wind currents, they took a moment to regard one another.

"What's the plan when we're down there?" Pariston asked.

Ging shrugged. "I don't know, go for a swim."

"A swimming race." Pariston added.

Cheadle inched her feet closer to the edge. "Loser cooks dinner."

They jumped.

A waterfall of colors, then darkness.

In the roiling belly of the lake, Cheadle opened her eyes inside a flurry of rising bubbles, and tried to make out anything in the water, any forms or shapes, and when she noticed other bubble whirls nearby, a way over her head, she swam up, the murky waters clearing, turning colder as she reached closer to the surface of the lake.

When her head broke out of the water, she found the race was already underway.

"If you know what's good for you you'll let me win!" She yelled after them, powering her way through the lake, and noted the way they hesitated, then stopped swimming for a minute to say something to each other, no doubt conspiring against her. "I can't cook for shit and you know that."

"There's always second place!" Ging yelled back, cackled, then dived in the water.

"Fuck no!"

Against the exhaustion needling through every muscle in her body, Cheadle swam like a shark was pursuing her, animated solely by spite and petty competitiveness.

"She's close!" Pariston laughed, flipping on his back to kick a torpedo of water on her face.

Cheadle dived at the spot where Ging had gone underwater too. She saw him, speeding towards her, and before she could kick him straight in the face he dodged, gliding away from her and far to the left. Ugh. Her chest was tightening; she had to swim back to the surface, yet just as she was about to reach it, a massive force whirled under her, taking her off guard, and before she could know it, Ging had picked her up, broke her out of the water and tossed her so high and far in the air she thought, for a second, that she was going to crash on land.

Instead, she hit water and plunged down, and couldn't even hold her breath because she was laughing.

"I really thought you were going to pull me down, not throw me into the stratosphere!" She yelled the instant her head came out of the water, coughing and laughing and coughing again, lifting up the curtain of hair that blinded her to find Pariston floating leisurely beside her, reaching a hand for him almost absent-mindedly, needing an anchor to rest and catch her breath.

He let her hand hold onto his shoulder, put his arm around her and gently pulled her closer so that she found herself resting against his chest as they paddled together to stay afloat. She glanced at him shyly and laughed. "Hi,"

Pariston returned her gaze, his eyes bright, cheeks and lips red and glistening with water drops, his golden hair catching the last of the sunset. He smiled. "Hi."

Then a strong spurt of water fountained out of the lake surface and right at their faces.

"Asshole," Cheadle slapped water at Ging's amused face, who appeared right from under them, then swam a little closer, now all three of them conjoined in a tight circle, faces inches away from one another, sharing in each other’s warm breaths, their feet bumping and brushing and grazing against one another.

And it's not that Cheadle didn't notice the little, quick glance Ging gave her arm around Pariston's neck, or his around her waist, or how she didn't let go of him even after she'd had ample time to catch her breath. And it's not that she didn't notice, either, the way Ging seemed to actually like what he saw, or that he himself wasn't particularly shying away from physical proximity, sidling up to them even closer so that one shoulder touched hers and the other Pariston's chest, his fingers teasing hers underwater.

They were all so close they could kiss, and for a good long moment—breaths slowing, pupils widening, lips opening—they appeared to all be thinking it.

But they didn't kiss.

Ging pulled back, the first to seemingly come to his senses, a mean smirk that was so alien to his face only a couple seconds ago marred his features. "You know the race isn't over, right?"

If Cheadle and Pariston ever shared anything in life, it was the long, disappointed sigh of quashed, unfulfilled yearning that escaped both their chests after Ging left them, swimming a little too fast to the shore, like he was escaping the very reality that anything might've happened between the three of them.

They looked at each other, and immediately, violently, Cheadle was filled with shame. She let go of Pariston and drew back, her eyes shifting wildly across the landscape, any place where she didn't have to meet his gaze.

Her heart thumped madly. What the fuck was she doing? And why did this hurt? She thought maybe if she weren't here the other two would have kissed. If she weren't there Ging would've stayed.

She chuckled, lost with no way to escape Pariston’s eyes on her. "Sorry I cost you a kiss."

Why was she apologizing, dammit. So what. So what if she cost him a kiss. It didn't matter, but why did she feel so at fault? She couldn’t have misread the atmosphere so terribly, could she? She didn't have to apologize for shit.

Pariston laughed, and when she glared at him he once again offered her his arm. This time, fully-aware, not needing it, wanting it, she accepted it. He didn't hold her or put a hand to her waist, but only brought her closer.

"It takes a while to coax you two out of your shells, huh," he said with a small, rueful smile. "Don't worry, he'll come around."

Only then did he pull her much closer, flush against his chest, and they were right back to the settlement baths, but her back wasn't against a hard cold wall. No. Cheadle was in everlasting waters, filled from head to toe with desire, her arms not avoiding him this time but actively seeking his proximity, touching his chest and neck and hair, gazing at the shine in his eyes, the dark brown of them turning a lighter shade as the sun set over the lake, to his lips, not smiling in malice as they were that day, but strangely, kinder, fuller.

He wasn't going to do the same as Ging, was he? He wasn't going to draw back at the last moment to humiliate her? This wasn't a ruse, or a trick, or cruelty?

When his mouth sought hers, when their lips met, Cheadle's heart sunk so far down she couldn't even feel it beating anymore, and she didn’t care if this was a ruse or a trick or cruelty, his lips so hot and hungry, she kissed him with shameful enthusiasm, with forceful buried want, and every time he sighed so deliciously into the kiss she pulled his hair even harder.

Her heart was pumping so much blood down to her pussy she felt dizzy.

Pariston only broke the kiss to plant smaller, wet kisses down her neck, up to her ears, and there he stopped, his breath swishing beside her ear. "It's not just me he wants," he whispered, and lifted his head to look at her, tucking a lock of hair behind her ear. "We want to play together, don’t we, Cheadle?" He kissed her again, much shorter this time, leaving her wanting. "So play smart, hmm?"

The two of them swam back in silence, and Cheadle let him hold her hand as if she might drift away if he didn't, as if she'll just slip into the water and disappear. His bandages wet against her palm, Pariston let her climb on shore first. Second place. Fucking of course.

There, Ging stood nearby, taking off his layers of clothes, tossing them on rocks to dry. Barefoot and shirtless, his eyes met hers for a second. Cheadle looked away from him.

She knew he was watching them make out in the middle of the water, she knew he saw it all, and it made their kiss hotter and more thrilling, her knees still a little weak from the reality of what happened, how all she could think about was that she wanted it again.

He must think she's the biggest hypocrite in the world, having maligned him for years over his sexual escapades and entanglements with Pariston, a pattern of behavior she was now very clearly and undeniably falling into as well. Or perhaps he was internally gloating over how she's come to eat her words—how hardships were, indeed, making her bond with Pariston, a possibility she openly rebuked only yesterday.

But then again, why did she have to care what Ging was thinking? He's the one who chickened out and left, he can go sulk in a corner and think whatever he fucking wants.

When he climbed on shore, Pariston made no effort to hide his erection, watching Ging's eyes follow him the moment he stepped out of the water, and when the two men passed each other, Ging only had cold looks for him.

Pariston merely smiled. "Seems it's me who will cook dinner. What do you suggest we hunt? There seems to be plenty of animals here."

For a good couple hours, everything was decided between the three of them with few words, impatient sentences, quipped remarks, curt gestures, and as little eye contact as humanly possible when one is communicating with their teammates. They hunted long-tailed, sharp-toothed rabbits, made fire, cooked food (including a large, venomous snake whose head Cheadle jammed with a knife almost without thought), watched nightfall descend over the lake, chose a shallow cave to sleep in, surrounded by curious animals on all sides and of all types, all while sharing little of their thoughts and keeping much to themselves.

After the light vanished from the sky and the world grew quiet and still, the three remained on the shore, their fire sizzling and crackling, Cheadle chewing on the last bits of salty snake meat while jotting down observations on her little yellow notebook, its papers crinkled at the edges due to water exposure. The samples she'd collected throughout the day were also laid out before her, undergoing, one by one, careful documentation and categorization. The hand in the vial with its filthy gold ring twinkled in the fire light. Her nitrogen tank had disappeared.

Pariston could sleep to this. The sound of pen on paper, the sound of crackling firewood.

Farthest away, with feet in the water, Ging sat, only his back illuminated by fire light. He had done and arranged everything with them, but only distantly, saying little to Pariston and less to Cheadle. He helped her skin the snake she hunted, but even then, he seemed to angle his whole body away from her at every opportunity.

Pariston had a guess or two as to why this stasis was going on, guesses from experience. He had no solid proof whether Cheadle and Ging were ever sexually involved, but he had always suspected it, and would congratulate himself on the sharpness of his observations if those suspicions proved true, because these two, if indeed something had happened between them, once or multiple times, have managed to hide it all so incredibly well, and for so many years, too. That island story they squabbled over in the kitchen the other night was suspect. Pariston knew they hid things, that Ging omitted facts and details, that Cheadle was embarrassed because he might not have done so. They were both so fucking cute back there Pariston wanted to smash their faces with a sledgehammer.

Cheadle was wrong in thinking she cost him a kiss, but the basis for her thinking wasn't entirely unfounded. Ging wouldn't really risk much by fucking Pariston. Their sexual history was indeed a fraught and bloody one, but there were no serious emotions at stake, and any bizarre and unconventional attachments that came to form between them thereafter were hardly the result of genuine, loving, good ol' boy bonding. Nothing Ging did, deliberately or accidentally, could ever hurt Pariston, or drive him away, or end their relationship for good, but that wasn't the case with Cheadle, because Cheadle and Ging were friends. Stiffly and distantly, but friends. It's what made them frustrated and irritated with each other one moment and chummy the next. Stiff and distant friends, because of Ging's listlessness and emotional aloofness that she often misconstrued as personal disinterest, and Cheadle's reclusiveness and high-strung personality making her a difficult person to grapple with for someone as carefree and easygoing as Ging.

Cheadle was the best in her field, but a whole team, better organized and equipped, would've done just fine and been less hassle. Ging called her here because he wanted _her_ , specifically, here, because he would rather undergo the trials and tribulations of her personality than contend with somebody lesser.

All that to say that Ging would be risking a lot by getting sexually involved with her. Not just for personal reasons, but for whatever plans he had in mind—and he had a lot of plans, it seemed.

It did not mean, however, that he didn't want to fuck her, or didn't think of it. Pariston knew he did, because once you spend a good enough time as the object of desire in somebody's gaze, you instantly recognize when that gaze includes another.

Leaving Cheadle to her work beside the fire, Pariston stood up and walked towards Ging.

"Can I sit?"

"Sure."

Pariston stared at the sweeping surface of the lake, dark under a murky sky that threatened to break out in a rainstorm any minute. Yet, it wasn't cold. On the contrary, Pariston felt terribly warm.

"I love how water appears in the night," he said, taking off his boots as well to dip them in the lake. Once they were in the water, they disappeared. "You know, how you can't tell where it begins or ends, how it seems to go on forever."

Ging remained silent for a moment, his eyes also taking in the expanse of inky blackness. "Did you ever see the Eso Lakes, in Harawan?" He asked. Pariston shook his head. "They're underground lakes that burst to surface every couple years, during sinkhole season. The water is naturally black, due to a certain, endemic kind of plankton. They're so clear and still you can see your reflection in them as if they were a mirror, but once you dip an arm or a leg, you experience 'phantom limb loss'. Your leg is there, and you know it's there, but you don't feel it."

Pariston glanced down at Ging's leg. Pants up to his knees, his injured calf swayed in the water, unbandaged, and Pariston could only see a little of it—fleshy yet slightly thinner than the other one, protruding in some parts and sunken in others.

"Are you sick, Ging?"

"Are you?"

"Only in my head."

Ging chuckled, finally looked at him. "What do you want?"

"A homemade taco."

Ging leaned back on his elbows and sighed to the sky. "Haven't eaten a taco in a really long time."

"Do you even like tacos?"

"Not really, but I'd eat one now if I could."

Pariston arched his back forward, resting his arms on his knees, searching Ging's distant expression. "Do you miss anything?"

"Sometimes."

"Did you miss us?" Pariston asked. "Cheadle and I?"

Ging smirked. "Would you be sad if I didn't?"

"Yeah, a bit."

"Then I didn't."

They laughed.

"Why did you run away?" Pariston asked again.

"In life?"

They laughed again.

"You know what I mean." Pariston said, smiling. "In the lake. I thought you wanted it."

Ging tilted his head. "What makes you think I do?"

"Oh, Ging, we're not twenty something anymore." Pariston replied, teasing the other's foot in the water with his own. "I've sucked your dick enough times to know when you have the hots for someone. Or two."

It was an ample opportunity to glance back at the lone woman by the fire, engrossed deeply in her work she didn't even bother throwing them glances.

Ging remained silent.

"Since when?"

"Since when what?"

Pariston shared a conspiratorial, boyish grin. "Since when do you fancy Cheadle?"

Ging rolled his eyes. "I don't 'fancy' Cheadle, just like I don’t fancy you. You know it's not that deep."

“But still a little complicated.”

“Complicated how?”

"Complicated like how you two fucked once and it was unfairly bad but you could never make up for it because your respective life trajectories and emotional baggage always stood in the way?"

Ging fell on his back laughing, then shot Pariston a highly amused look of wonder. "That's a pretty accurate reading for someone who doesn't know anything."

"Really?" Pariston gasped. "I was shooting in complete darkness here!"

Ging regarded him with both suspicion and admiration. "I forgot how eerily good you are with these kinds of things. You haven't been obsessing over it, have you?"

"You can't ask a prisoner what occupies his mind all day, no?" Pariston smiled. "And you're yet to answer my first question."

Ging looked away, back at the water. "I'm not going to give her what she wants just because I want it too. She has to come for it herself."

"But she did, in the water?"

Ging pouted. "That's different, I wasn't ready."

"How arbitrary your standards."

"Take it or leave it." Ging shrugged. "If she wants us, she should come to us and ask for it. She knows that."

Pariston hummed. "What if she doesn't come because she thinks you don't want her?"

"She'll risk a chance." Ging smirked. "It's hotter that way."

"It seemed you had something to say about us, there in the lake."

"What’s there to say? You might not have been attracted to her in the past but you've always been obsessed with her sexual expression, maybe more so after she broke your spirit." Ging started. "She denies you that part of herself and any glimpse of it and that only fuels your obsession. You know she has sex, but it's not with you or anybody you know. Because you think you know her so well, that aspect of her life fascinates you. You wonder what her sexual choices say about her, but it's so closed off to you it makes you itch. You feel ownership over her, just like you feel over me." He smiled. "You want to lure her and rip her skin off, and she likes that, because it means you see her. She's attracted to you, paradoxically, because you repulse her, and might hurt her. She's a moth and you're her flame, and she never learned to flutter her wings away from you, because deep down, she doesn't want to. Her hatred of you gives that attraction a darker edge she’s never been willing to admit to herself. You excite her, her hatred of you excites her, and you know Cheadle well enough to know that sometimes, she likes to burn herself just to see how much she can take it."

Pariston grinned. "We're perfectly situated for mutual destruction."

"Seems so."

"And me, Ging," he said, searched the gleam in the other man's eyes. Why did he sound a little desperate? "Do you still want me, like before?"

"I do."

The shackles around Pariston's ankle stung his skin, but the water lessened the pain, carrying it away in its dark depths. Yeah, he and Ging weren't twenty something anymore. The other man always had a way of making Pariston feel like a little giddy boy, that hasn't changed, and yet, strangely, this seemed like the most mature personal conversation they've ever had. There was no power play here, no displays of prowess and emotional detachment, no threat of spontaneous violence hanging over them. They were two grown men beside a lake, talking amicably, honestly, for the first time, about desire.

Pariston didn't know how to feel about it. He could resent it, but a part of him liked this, this unexpected progression of their relationship, this ease in which they treated each other, in which Ging just went and said all those things.

How did he manage to live ten years without this man?

Pariston burst out laughing. "Are we old and boring?"

Ging gave him an amused look. "Never."

"I miss our quickies on Netero's desk." Pariston confessed. "I doubt we'll ever find an equally exciting surface."

Ging chuckled. "That's Cheadle's desk now, if you think about it."

The two shared an evil little smile.

But then, like a sudden lightning bolt, something leapt over them and plunged into the water, splashing them both.

They glanced at the fire then back to the water, where bubbles formed and rippled on the surface.

"Cheadle?"

After a moment, she appeared at a distance, ghostly white and dead silent, swimming towards them, only her eyes visible above water, then slowly her body rose up, her arms grazed the surface of the water, her chest bare.

Fully naked, she came to a stop between them, her slender, freckled, strong arms stretched coyly on the shore, eyelashes wet and dripping. They stared at her and she stared back, all of them silent. Cheadle sighed and pulled back a little, exposing her breasts to them. Small and perfectly rounded and as freckled as her arms and shoulders, they moved with the rise and fall of her chest, her pink nipples hard against the cold water, her lips, likewise, turned a full, chilly purple, begging to be warmed. Hair slicked back, she regarded them both from behind her eyelashes, a small, sultry smile adorning her face, her fingers teasing their knees, sneaking under their pants to caress their thighs.

"You really know how to keep a woman waiting.”

Fast the way only someone who’s himself been waiting for long could be, Ging grabbed her arm and hauled her out of the water and up to his lap. Her arms instantly found his neck, her legs his waist. Cheadle straddled him, naked while he was still fully clothed, which only seemed to excite her more.

Their lips were a hair away from meeting, her fingers running through his hair, his hands trailing her back, bringing her even closer, but when Ging was about to kiss her she turned her face away from him. Her eyes seized Pariston. "Come here."

Pariston crawled to her, sunk his fingers in the wet strands of her glistening hair, taking the arm she threw around him, the ravenous kiss she offered him, the way her lips were even softer than the first time, the way their coldness melted away as he kissed her upper lip, lower lip, chin and ears, her face to him, the rest of her body to Ging, his hands circling her back to her breasts, her nipples pale and perky between his fingers, found then by his tongue as he licked and kissed and sucked and bit the skin under his mouth. Cheadle moaned against Pariston's lips, bit them, thrusted her hips against Ging's crotch.

Then she broke the kiss, breathless, her eyes gazing into Pariston's, her fingers slithering over the nape of his neck, her lips seeking his cheeks, his jawline, the neck he exposed to her, the edges of his ears. Pariston sighed, his eyelids fluttering, his mouth dry, blood rushing down to his dick.

"Take off my clothes." He murmured, already reaching for the buttons of his dress shirt. It wasn't she but Ging who obliged him.

He clutched Cheadle still on his lap by her ass, his other hand working its way down through button after button, and then they all burst out laughing, because unbuttoning Pariston was taking a while.

"You used to be faster than this," Pariston teased. Ging ripped all the remaining buttons, pulled Pariston hard by his torn shirt and smacked their lips together, coiling an arm around his back, claiming both of them to himself.

Their bodies wrapped around each other in a tight circle, they all took a moment to breathe, their chests falling and rising in unison, eyes gleaming, slowly, gradually, coming into a moment of shared awkwardness where none knew how to move next, or how to progress.

They exchanged amused, funny looks, not wholly embarrassed but not entirely comfortable either, caressing each other's faces, brushing hair, leaning on each other.

"So," Cheadle started, teasing Ging's lips with her fingers. "It's not fair I'm the only one who's getting cold here."

In one full swoop, Ging stood up with her still attached to his hips, his hands cupping her ass, her legs around him. "You want to be warm, huh."

In giddy, impatient laughter, they ran to the small cave they had padded with big leaves, their fire crackling at its entrance. In the fire-lit, warm cave, Ging fell to his knees, letting go of her, arms over his head where her shaking hands pulled up his tank top. Cheadle slunk herself off his lap, hands caressing down his arms to his chest, her lips seeking every exposed inch of his body except his lips, and she kissed the trail of hair from his belly button to the hem of his pants, hooking her fingers to pull it down, and he stretched his legs out to let her take them off him, turning to Pariston to rid him of the torn shirt, sliding it down his arms, then teaming up with her to undress him.

Cheadle stepped away, her back to the wall, theirs to the cold air and fire outside. She pulled them to her, kissed their chests and shoulders and necks, drawing them closer inside, her fingers searching their skin, wanting to know it, to remember it, to make it hers, forgetting her body in the sight of their own.

“Lie down.” Ging said.

She did.

Exposed so utterly to them, her body pulsing from head to toe, hair strewn around her head, legs open, her long abdomen scar visible to their preying eyes, from the underside of her left breast to her belly button, Cheadle took their bodies in, watching them hungrily as they stared at her, as they too revealed their bodies to her, muscled and strong and filled with as much desire as hers, her heartbeat thumping in every part of her body as they stood naked before her, in the mouth of the cave, the fire and stars outside silhouetting their beautiful figures, the lean muscles in their arms and legs and chests and abdomens, their cocks, how their eyes drank her, her open body, how even in the surrealism of it all, she knew they wanted to fuck her as much as she wanted to fuck them.

Cheadle lifted her arms towards them, calling them to her, to their makeshift bed, and there, for the first time in a second lifetime, she kissed Ging again.

She melted against his body, let him surround her, behold her to him with every limb, legs and arms around her, his cock hard and so perfectly between her legs she wanted to push him on his back and ride him right then and there, but she wanted this kiss, she wanted it so much and was terrified that if she broke it, if she pulled away, it was never going to happen again.

On her other side, Pariston's lips trailed down her neck, her spine, her ass, his hands caressing their thighs and legs.

Cheadle parted her lips from Ging's, then left hurried, fluttery kisses on his mouth, his jawline, neck, felt the calloused pads of his fingers against her back, then turned the other side, cupped Pariston’s cheek and brought his lips to her, and when his hand snaked down between her legs she opened them wider for him. Ging kissed her neck, sucked on her collarbone, taking her breasts in his hands then mouth. Her body writhed between them, her hands reaching down to stroke their cocks, her heavy breathing intermingling with theirs.

Then she straddled Pariston's waist and climbed him, his dick hard between her labia, against her clit. She closed her eyes, grinded slowly on him. Cheadle breathed out, digging her nails in his abdomen, gliding her wet pussy over his shaft, watching him swallow as he threw his head back, his chuckle turning into a soft moan as Ging held his face and kissed him.

Ging glanced at her, his tongue gliding down Pariston's chest and nipples, and they shared a little smile when she saw understanding in his eyes, her heart sinking when he approached her ever so slowly, leaving kisses on his way down Pariston's stomach, then his lips found her body again, kissing the inside of her thigh, grazing his teeth against her skin, then over her scar, his breath hot, wet, and when they were face to face again he grabbed the back of her head and kissed her fiercely, their tongues gliding against each other, but then he stopped and stood up, the tip of his big cock dangling just slightly over her mouth. Warm against her lips, Cheadle stuck her tongue out, licked it, put the tip in her mouth and popped it out with a wet sound, her fingers sliding up his thigh and ass and balls to wrap around his dick in a loose grip to gently stroke him, and she smiled when he gritted his teeth, pulled her hair, looked down at her with dark eyes.

She turned away from him, lifted her hips up, grabbed Pariston's cock, soaked in her juices, stroked it for a minute too, then sat on it.

Pariston closed his eyes and threw his head back, a small moan escaping him at the heat and wetness inside her, and when she began moving slowly back and forth, he sunk his nails in her hips, dragged them down. Cheadle sat lower, driving him deeper insider her, wanting him deeper, her walls contracting around his shaft, moaning when he bucked his hip up hard, once, twice.

"So you think you're good at sucking dick, Pariston?" When he opened his eyes, Cheadle smiled at him. "Watch and learn."

Then inch by inch, teasing with her lips and teeth and tongue, she took every last bit of Ging's dick in her mouth. He growled.

Down, she rode Pariston a little faster, her moans muffled by the cock that filled her mouth.

Ging wanted so much to thrust mercilessly into her, to grab her head and fuck her pretty little mouth, but she was sucking him so damn good, circling the tip with her wet tongue while her hand jerked him off painfully slowly, her eyes half closed as his cock popped in and out of her mouth, spit dripping down her lips and chin.

His eyes met Pariston's, at that point the one controlling the rhythm, with every slow, deep thrust inside Cheadle, her mouth took more of Ging, whose gaze drank them both under him, the point where their bodies connected, where Pariston's thumb pressed circles around Cheadle's clit, where his dick pounded in and out of her, their cheeks and ears and chests reddening.

Every time the tip of his dick touched the back of Cheadle's throat, every time he heard their moans and the whiny little sounds they repressed, he felt dizzy, his knees growing weaker, his grip on Cheadle's hair the only thing keeping him upright.

Reluctantly, Ging pulled out. They could end it quickly like this, but he wanted it to last, wanted it to go on for as long as their bodies and the exhaustion weighing them down could stand.

Cheadle let out a whiny, frustrated noise when he pulled out of her mouth. It made him want to fuck it again. "Why?" She frowned, but he couldn't take it seriously, her tits bouncing, her expression changing instantly when Pariston grabbed her waist hard and thrust fast and rough into her, letting out a scream of pleasure and bending down to balance herself on Pariston's chest, where he pulled her flush against him, locked her in place with his arms and pounded into her pussy with so much force her moans and screams probably startled a couple animals outside.

Ging watched this, his mouth dry and heart racing, watched their mouths crash against each other, their lips sucking and biting, and thought he could watch this all night, that these two fucking was the closest thing he ever had to a persistent sexual fantasy, that he didn't feel any less pleasure at being a voyeur, the way he was on the shore, watching them make out in water for the first time.

Watching Pariston screw her like this, her juices dribbling down her inner thighs, on his balls, Ging felt like a million little flames were lit up under his skin, his chest constricted, felt heat and sweat engulf his whole body and emanate from it, every inch of his skin pricking and tingling.

Ging knelt on the ground between Pariston's legs and behind Cheadle, pulled her away from Pariston's arms and into his, kissed the nape of her neck, the dip of her spine, the dozen little scars, scratches, bites and burn marks, her skin damp and hot, her head leaning back against his shoulder, her eyes seeking his, her breathing deep and lush, lips planting little kisses on his chin and jawline and earlobe, bending her arm to grab a handful of his hair, Pariston going easier, falling into a deliciously slow rhythm.

"I still want you to cum in my mouth," she murmured against his ear, sucked his earlobe, licked the ridges of his ear, her words and hot breath sending sharp tingles down his spine.

One hand cupped and squeezed her tits, his fingers circling her nipples, the other snaked down her stomach to her pubic bone.

"Why not dye these too?" He asked, his fingers tilling her coarse orange pubes.

A breathless chuckle escaped her. "You'd laugh at me."

His fingers brushed against her wet clit, she sucked in a breath, leaning farther against him. "Yeah..."

Ging teased her more, not using any pressure, the tips of his fingers only grazing her clit, only passing it, collaborating with Pariston who also came down to painfully shallow, weak thrusts, sharing impish smiles, convening to drive her mad.

Desperately Cheadle's hand covered his, trying to make him press her clit and rub it. He pinched her nipple. She whined. "Take off your hand."

Her fingers tried to slip past his to get herself off but he barred them. "Don't do this to me."

Ging pulled her hair hard. "I'll do whatever I fucking want to you. Besides," he kissed her neck. "Pariston has to give orders."

"Fuck him!" She groaned as he thrusted deep inside her.

Suddenly, Pariston straightened up, squishing her between the two of them, his face breaking with a coy smile. "Fuck me you say?" He stared at her eyes, kissed her rosy lips, then kissed Ging, his tongue gliding over dry lips. "You want to see Ging fuck me?" He kissed her shoulder. "You want to see how he screws me?" He kissed her neck, bucked his hips under her, his cock twitching inside her as her walls convulsed around it.

She took a long breath, caressed his cheek. "I hope Ging tears you a new asshole."

"You'd love to watch it, wouldn't you."

Cheadle smiled, red in the face, resting her head on Ging’s shoulder. "I will neither deny nor confirm that I'd 'love' to wat—"

Pariston kissed her, shutting her up. "Just say you fantasize about it all the time."

"You flatter yourself."

Ging tilted her chin up and kissed her, slower, and as Pariston leaned back a little and resumed fucking her at a relaxed, steady pace, he let her have what she wanted, untangling his fingers from hers to rub her clit to the rhythm of Pariston’s hips. “Is this how you like it?”

Humming sweetly, her body sunk into his, her eyes closed. “A little down.”

“Here?”

Cheadle sucked in a breath, grabbed his forearm, curling her toes. Pariston too gave himself to the feelings and sensations of his body, his head thrown back, a smile on his face, biting his lips.

Face buried in Cheadle’s hair, Ging breathed them in, their skin, the heat of their bodies, their moans and whimpers, and it took him off guard, for a moment, just how much he’d wanted this, wanted it to go on, to happen again.

“Fuck Pariston,” Cheadle whispered against his neck. “I wanna watch.”

Ging held her tight against his chest, saw Pariston smiling. “Yeah?”

They both nodded.

He got up and left them, walking out of the cave to clothes he’d thrown outside to dry.

"Where are you going?"

"A minute."

When he returned, he had that gooey cannibal plant saliva with him. A whole jar of it.

He tossed the jar to Pariston. "Lube."

Pariston gave the transparent substance a suspicious, repulsed look. "I'd rather do it raw."

"Don't be a little bitch," Ging smirked. "This actually works great."

"You tried it before?"

"Yes."

"On yourself?"

Ging smirked. "Open your legs and I'll tell you."

Pariston was about to open the jar, but Cheadle took it from him. Then, reluctantly, she got off his dick and stood over him. "Lie on your back."

He smiled, obeyed, reclined on his back and opened his legs wide for them. "Spoil me."

Ging lied down by his side, Cheadle knelt between his legs, the jar open beside her, her hands caressing his thighs, teasing the sparse, curly hairs covering his legs.

It was strange, this physical intimacy with him, this closeness, the way he responded to her touches like they've been doing all this for years, the way he seemed to let go of some aspect of his self and give it entirely to the moment, to her, to them.

Was any of them even themselves right now? All this seemed to exist outside material reality, outside ancient, unwritten rules.

Three predators in a cave. The idea that they could all hurt each other right now was thrilling.

The idea that Pariston lay between them like this, that he squirmed in pleasure at her lubed fingers circling his butthole, the heat of his body and the moans he muffled in Ging's neck when she inserted a finger, when Ging's hand slid down to stroke his cock, smiling and red in the face, pulling his knee up, curling his toes.

"I forgot how good this is." He muttered, sucking in a breath as she inserted another finger and drove them deeper inside him, gazing at her through his eyelashes, head buried in Ging's neck. "Move them left a little."

"Like this?"

"Fuck, yeah," he coiled his leg around her, digging his toes in her back, the cold metal of the monitor zapping her skin.

Cheadle grabbed his leg and draped it over her shoulder, kissed the inside of his knee, picked up speed, maintaining the angle he liked. "You like this?"

His leg twitched. She added a third finger. He sunk his teeth in Ging's shoulder, nodding rapidly, let go of everything but the pleasure he was feeling. Cheadle felt it too, luscious pleasure at giving this to him, felt herself on the edge of orgasm without even touching herself, her clit pulsing, her legs a little numb, colorless ooze dripping from her pussy and fingers as she fingered him harder, as he trembled and kissed Ging with a hungry ferocity.

Then Ging nodded to her, not any less dizzyingly aroused, and slipped away from Pariston's side and to hers. Cheadle stroked him with a handful of lube in her palm, caressed the tip with her thumb, Ging sighing deeply, resting his forehead against hers.

He smiled at her. "You can sit on his face."

She can sit on Pariston's face, but she wanted to watch first. She kissed Ging.

"Just do your job."

Cheadle gave him space, leaving the little nook of Pariston's open legs, and chose a dark spot just left of them, a small ledge where she could rest her searing hot back against the cold walls of the cave, where she had a straight line of vision to them, a perfect view.

Ging climbed over him, resting his cock over Pariston's and stroked them both, his strong grip gliding over slippery skin.

Pariston sighed, cupped Ging's face with his hand, pulled him down for a kiss. "Did you miss this?"

"What do you think?" Ging smiled, jerking them harder one last time, prolonging it, slowing it, then sliding his body down. "Slowly or all at once?" He asked, holding Pariston's long legs over his shoulders, teasing the latter's asshole with his shaft.

"You know how I like it."

When Ging's dick was shoved deep inside him, forcefully and all at once, Pariston felt so good he could cry. He wanted to cry, mostly because this felt like drinking water after years of thirst. Pariston had frequently jerked himself off to this exact sensation, the sensation of a big, hard cock filling him so completely, twitching inside him.

Then Ging pulled out slowly, and thrust hard into him. Pariston moaned loudly. Again, with every thrust Ging sped up until he was pounding into him roughly, deeply, the loud sound of skin smacking skin mingling with their groans.

He didn't usually like to touch his dick during penetration, but Pariston felt his self-control slip, felt his whole body pooling to hot white liquid, his hand mindlessly reaching down to jerk himself, to draw him closer to climax, but Ging didn't need to see that to know he was about to cum, yet the bastard suddenly stopped and pulled out with bated breath, exchanged a smile with Cheadle and flipped him roughly on his stomach.

Pariston laughed, his forehead brushing leaves. "You're being mean."

Cheadle squatted down to his level, removed a stuck leaf and kissed his sweaty forehead. "It's what you deserve, pillow princess."

"Something tells me you like me like that," his hand creeped up her thigh, following a sticky trail of juices to the soft frills of her inner labia, her swollen clit. "Or am I wrong?"

She smiled darkly down at him, and when Ging lifted his ass up to resume fucking him, he slipped down between her open legs, licked his lips, gazed adoringly at the pink matter she offered him, a tingle clutching his shoulders as she contracted around the finger he slipped inside her, at the small shudder that ran through her body, at the heat that engulfed his fingers as he moved them inside her.

"You have a very cute pussy." He kissed her clit.

"Thanks, I designed it myself."

Pariston's chuckle turned into a long moan as Ging entered him again. "You took this from me." He growled, grapping her thighs to slide her farther down to him.

Her smile was cold, her hands pushing his head between her legs. "You should’ve asked for a dildo instead of those silly novels."

Tongue exploring her soaking wet cunt, Pariston tasted himself in her, looked up at her peachy cheeks and chapped lips, her mouth open, bucking her hips to grind her clit against his tongue, pulling his hair, Ging's hands grabbing his ass, the heat almost unbearable as he felt himself close to orgasm again, the faster Ging moved the more enthusiastically he buried his face between Cheadle's legs, the deeper his fingers went. Pariston fingered her slowly, the pads of his fingers rubbing her inside while his tongue drew small circles around her clit. Cheadle groaned, threw her head back, pulled his mouth even closer.

"Don't stop," she purred, her legs shaking, digging her nails in his neck, arching her back.

Ging reached for Pariston's dick, stroked it slowly in rhythm with his own thrusts, then faster, watching Cheadle close to her own climax, he to his own. Pariston shuddered, felt his orgasm bloom long and hard from inside him, sizzle down his spine and legs way before the sticky leaves under him drowned under thick ropes of semen, his tongue lapping Cheadle's juices, swallowing them, his moans melding with hers, her whole body rocking and trembling against his mouth, convulsing around fingers he couldn't even move anymore, his own body turning into a sticky, amorphous dough, and so did hers as she fell back on the ground, the leaves rustling under her outstretched arms, one leg limp over his back. Pariston rested his head on her stomach, wrapped his arms around her torso as he felt Ging's cock twitch inside his ass, felt hot semen filling him, and Ging's quieter groans as he emptied his load inside him. Then Ging pulled out and walked on gooey hands and knees to them, where he fell with a sigh beside Cheadle.

For a long while, the three of them laid like this, filling the cave with the sound of collective, heavy breathing.

Cheadle played with Pariston's soft hair, tilled it with her fingers, scratched his scalp, his hot breaths damping her stomach, smiled when he purred and closed his eyes like a content tomcat. She turned her head to look at Ging.

She smiled, still a little hazy and not really able to see clearly, offered him her arm to rest his head on. He took it, the coarse hair growing anew on his face prickly against her skin.

Ging clumsily brushed her bangs away from her forehead, then just kept his hand on her head, like he was imparting some wisdom. She snorted softly, sensed his increasing shyness, sensed it more because it mirrored her own.

"You don't have to be cuddly," she whispered to him, even as his cheek squished against her bicep and his hand slid down from the top of her head to brush the upper end of her scar, rubbing her cold toes between his feet.

"Can you see me properly?"

"No."

They chuckled.

"Would it make you less shy, if I didn't see your face very well?"

"Yeah,"

Cheadle hummed. "Then you're just a blob, to me."

It was probably all the good chemicals still swirling in her body that made her bolder and terribly less inhibited. She bent her arm to bring him closer.

They remained silent, gazing into each other's eyes, Ging's hand leaving the scar to touch her arm, his fingers lulling lazily back and forth between her shoulder and elbow where the remains of the yellow fly bites still lingered, then as if stung, he drew his hand to himself, set it on the ground between them.

"Do you regret it?" He asked, his voice a murmur.

"No," almost soundless. "Do you think I'm a hypocrite?"

"No."

Cheadle sighed against his smile. Under her other hand, Pariston's breathing fell into a regular rhythm. They didn't talk for a couple minutes.

"What are you thinking about?"

"That I need to pee and Pariston’s big head is pressing on my bladder."

"I need to pee too."

They snickered like little mice. Neither got up to pee.

"Thank you, today in the cavern, for calling my name when I was afraid.”

“You didn’t need me for that.”

“I hope I won’t need you much.”

Outside, their fire crackled.

Without much thought, she left a long, tender kiss on his lips.

"Sorry."

Ging kissed her.

"When did you become you?"

"1990, the year Re-10 dropped their seminal album, Girl Violence, changing the face of the grunge music scene forever."

Ging chuckled into her arm.

"You're funny."

"Only when I'm horny or sleepy."

Cheadle didn't see it, but she could feel his smile against her arm, the way the corners of his lips pulled upwards.

She didn't see, either, how vulnerable he looked.

"You're different."

"How?"

"Still figuring it out."

**III**


	11. The Secret in the Wall

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which you get a whole chapter from Pariston's perspective. As a treat.

At the edge of the lake, Ging insisted Pariston come into the water to dry the sugar. “It’s for Ritwik’s coat business.” He said, splashing around like a manic dolphin. The settlement was right behind him. There was a cave, wasn’t there?

“Where’s Cheadle?”

“Answering a phone call from the Association.”

Away in the distance, Cheadle was standing beside a phonebooth, answering a phone call from the Association.

“It’s about you.” Ging said, laughing, then falling into resigned silence. “They say it’s the only way to sell more coats.”

Pariston’s body was blue, his hair white. “And the headache?”

“It’s insured.”

To the sounds of water splashes and leaves rustling, to the scents of dew and warmth, alone in the cave, his body covered with clothes not his own, Pariston woke up, smelling of everything but himself. He shuddered under this makeshift blanket, rubbed his feet together, closed his eyes again because he didn't want to wake up, chuckling to himself about the prospect of insuring his headaches. Shivering, he buried himself in the warmth, wanting to sleep more, to sleep till afternoon, his body so light and feathery, sleep so utterly delicious.

Insuring his headaches. Pariston straightened up.

Last night, he fell asleep to the caresses of Cheadle's hand and her quiet mutterings with Ging. He had dropped into this expansive void of nothingness so quickly, so immediately, not once waking up, or moving, or feeling anything, not having a single dream or a snap of pain in his head to wake him up in the middle of the night.

He touched his forehead, pressed it hard with his fingers, shook his whole head, strained his eyeballs up and down. Nothing. There was no pain at all. Not a drip of it, not even a little pulse or some oncoming heat. He felt so clear, so lucid, and now after the haze of last night had cleared, Pariston remembered how during sex his headache had completely disappeared as well; it was gone that whole time but he didn't realize that until now, as he stared outside the cave at the early hours of sunrise, at the green and blue just out of sight, Ging and Cheadle's voices filling the world beyond the cave.

Either his eyes were cleansed of some mist or the world really did become clearer. Every surface and object retained a brighter color, became visually richer, nicer to look at and touch.

Slowly, he pushed all those clothes off him, Ging's long scarf, Cheadle's tweed jacket and cotton shirts. They seemed to have piled their clothes on him because he was cold at one point during the night. If it were true, Pariston had felt absolutely nothing.

Getting up, he realized he was sticky with all the bodily fluids of last night. When he licked his lips and chin he still tasted Cheadle, his own semen still half dry on his stomach and Ging's between his legs.

Cheadle better have brought soap with her.

He trotted naked out of the cave, rubbing his arms against the chilly morning air, the grass and moss and rocks freezing cold under his feet. Their fire was alight, crackling under a circle of fish on spears, roasting slowly. Beside it was a big leaf, laid out on the ground and brimming with weird, colorful fruits. A couple small rodents were sniffing around their food, their grubby tiny hands about to steal some fruit. Pariston scared the little thieves away with a pebble. They retreated but not far away, their black, intelligent eyes seizing him up and down contemptuously.

His eyes scouted the lake and he spotted them, two figures far away, romping in the water. They seemed to notice him and promptly came swimming.

Did these two even sleep all night? Pariston felt so left out. And resentful. Their nen afforded them more energy and made them stronger. They could keep going when he couldn't.

Under the warm morning sun, they reached him, throwing their arms on the shore, Cheadle saddled with her nitrogen tank. They were collecting samples.

“I dreamt about you,” he smiled, crouched on the shore to take a closer look at them, their faces dewy and rosy, their eyes bright and sharp. He hoped he looked fresh like this. "You look peachy."

Cheadle reached with her hand towards his head, adjusted some jumpy, unruly hairs. "Does your head still hurt?"

"No, I feel good." He said. "Wait."

She had placed something in his hair. Pariston grabbed it and brought it down for inspection.

An iridescent, bright yellow limpet.

"It looks like you."

He smiled. "Does it?"

"Come to the water," Ging said, terribly cute with his hair down on his forehead like this. He didn't give Pariston much opportunity to enjoy this rare look, pushing them back like he always did. "We'll wash you."

"I was in fact going to ask if we have any soap." He said. "I smell like an 18th century taxidermy someone jerked off to in their grandfather’s basement."

"That's specific.”

He winked at them, tucking a wet hair strand behind Cheadle’s ear. Her natural hair color was starting to show at the roots. "I’d kill both of you for a hot shower right now.”

"Too bad. There's soap, in my clothes," Cheadle said, pointing to the cave. "In the lower left pocket of my shirt, not the cotton the other one, and not the corner pocket, the one beside it." She smiled. "I left it unsewn for you."

He sighed. So much work just to scrape off a handful of cum.

At the edge of the lake, Pariston dipped his body in icy water, then climbed the shore again to soap himself. Bathing in the open like this, he felt a little removed.

He looked back at the fire, saw that the little pesky rodents had come back and were enthusiastically munching on their fruits.

"We took blood samples from them.” Cheadle said. “They must be pretty hungry."

The rodents seemed to notice Pariston staring at them disapprovingly because they came to a stop, standing on their hind legs, perking their round, fluffy ears, staring him right back in the eye, little dripping fruit pieces in their hands. He glanced at Ging.

"Do they hold grudges?"

"I hope not," Ging smiled, throwing one shy rodent a piece of fruit. "They're pretty harmless."

Sharing food was a mistake. Now that the small, anxious creatures ascertained the friendliness of two out of three, they refused to leave, especially when Ging took what little fruit was left and tried to shoo them away. They seemed to take it as personal offense that something once given was now being taken away.

"We're hungry too you little shits." Ging gently pushed with his foot one brave rodent who was trying to climb his leg. "They probably think I want to feed them."

They surrounded him, sniffing his legs, staring up at him with terribly innocent, terribly conniving eyes.

"Just make them your pets." Pariston chuckled, laying down, letting the sun dry his skin.

Ging scoffed. "Hell no. I only had one pet in my life and it was a dragon. I raised her till she had a kid of her own. After that you just don’t get other pets."

"What did you name her?" Cheadle asked, trekking her way through the tribe of rodents that besieged Ging.

He shrugged. "I just called her The Dragon."

Cheadle smiled at that, her hand reaching between Ging's arm for a fruit, then she grabbed one and tossed it nearby.

The rodents only stared at her impassively.

"They're smart, huh."

"Uh-huh."

"Hmm."

Cheadle gazed long at their new companions then back at Ging. "You're right. We don't want pets, we want lab rats."

"And you think these will do?"

"What's the rate of their reproduction?" Cheadle asked, excited. "They're small, so I imagine it's high. If I can take only two back with me, I can raise a litter in the lab, and conduct experiments."

Appropriately, surrounded by greedy little rodents, the three ate like a bunch of starving cave people, famished half-naked beasts wolfing down their food with abandon.

They discussed their next plans. They were going to camp here for another night, two at most, collecting samples from the surrounding forest and exploring the settlement and its units, and then they will move west of the lake, towards Don's home. What might happen there and when they might return were left open-ended.

The map laid out between them, Ging pointed out all the shortcuts (necessary if Cheadle hoped to return to the settlement soon) and habitats for animals they could use for a ride across long distances (there's a reason he and Don don't meet up all that often).

Of course, it was all too natural that Don Freecs wouldn't be easy to find or reach. Moreover, Ging warned, there was always the possibility that the old man simply won't be home when they arrive. Would they be willing to wait for him, then? And if yes, how long?

Don came and went as he pleased, and often disappeared for months at a time. He wandered the land in every direction and only recently settled in one place. So, Ging asked once again, how long would they be willing to wait?

Cheadle decided that they’ll just take their chances. The trip wouldn’t be wasted either way.

Was Ging himself, Pariston wondered, willing to go there at all? He seemed reticent about some things, and admitted that he and his grandfather don't actually get along all that well or see eye to eye in most matters, so they ought not to expect Ging to be their middleman or facilitate any planned long-term transactions or communications. If they want anything from Don, they better work for it themselves.

Was there something he's waiting for? Did he want them to meet Don later and not this soon? Has he told Don about them? When Pariston asked, Ging said yes. After all, Don was curious too about this new disease, and apparently, surprisingly, it wasn't something he's encountered before, not in over two centuries of living in the continent, of drinking its water and eating its food and enjoying the immortality its rare crops bestowed upon him.

Throughout all discussions and plans, info exchange and mental preparations, nobody even hinted at what had occurred last night, or alluded to it in any way. Nobody seemed willing. Happened and then over, they all seemed to bury it within their private worlds, as if they weren't surrounded by people whose doors led to theirs and back.

Everything strapped to them once again, the three started climbing the mossy rock slopes towards the surrounding forest, agreeing first to pursue wildlife during peak activity instead of wasting daylight exploring the settlements.

On the way up, and because he couldn't stop thinking of those abandoned settlements and therefore haunted houses, Pariston started recounting the story of their old haunted house on Gutedel. Telling that story was always a good ice breaker, whenever he met new people, and for that he wasn't entirely sure why he needed it with Ging and Cheadle; it seemed they needed an ice breaker every other hour, solidifying back on themselves the moment they were about to thaw completely.

First, he had to lay the groundwork for the story, paint the background, the time and place, had to summarize as succinctly as possible, opening up with a fact: his story, first and foremost, was 100 percent true, because all Hill family members can attest to seeing ghosts in the house, so it wasn't just him.

Pariston remembered it calmly and clearly, and perhaps remembered it this strongly because he was a little afraid, when he saw the old man in the hallway, about to turn a corner between his sleeping room and the back porch.

He felt like an animal whose home was invaded.

Seven-year-old and precocious, Pariston stood at his door, the doorknob still in his hand as he stared at the moving man, at his ghastly face and long arms, his back hunched, holding a hand to the side of his face, as if he was covering something or listening closely, and he wasn't looking at Pariston and didn't appear to notice him at all. Instead, he was peering contemplatively inside another hallway.

Cheadle interrupted his narration. "Wait, did he look like movie ghosts? Was he transparent and floating?"

"No," Pariston shook his head, steadying his hand on a protruding rock to pull himself up. "He appeared like a normal human made of aura, and wore really nice clothes too."

So at first, Pariston had believed him to be some kind of intruder, a thief, someone there to hurt them, so he stood his ground.

His room's door creaked. The intruder looked his way.

Pariston held his breath, eyes wide open, staring long at the ghost who appeared much bigger than him, turning around to regard the small boy face to face, his body silhouetted by the beautiful summer moon outside the porch, the same light that exposed Pariston’s body as tiny and vulnerable in comparison.

Slowly, the man began moving towards him.

Pariston didn't move, only his grip loosened around the doorknob, his legs ready to bolt.

Then the ghost dropped his ear.

Ging burst out laughing. "What."

"I'm not joking!" Pariston pouted, looking at Cheadle for support. She was snickering too. "He really did drop his ear, it was so creepy."

"Like what, did it just fall off his head?" Cheadle asked.

"He was holding it in his palm, against his head, where it was cut off." Pariston said. "When he moved his hand, the ear fell to the floor."

"How did you know his ear was severed?" Cheadle asked.

"Don't try to beat the story to the finish line, Cheadle," Pariston frowned at her. "It's a cherished family tale not a forensic document."

The severed ear on the wooden floor of the house was so shocking to him that he pivoted his whole body at once and sped madly away from the earless man. He ran to Lillian, first, because until the age of fifteen it was Lillian he told everything to first.

Pariston ran without looking back, the chafing of his pajamas and the thudding of his bare feet on wood the only sounds in the hallway, obscuring everything else.

He tried to open his sister's door but it was locked, so he rapped the door with his palm, hissed her name, and waited out alone in the dark hallway, looking around him, his hands balled into fists.

After a moment of trepidation, Lillian hissed his name back, waited for confirmation again, then opened the door a crack just so she was absolutely certain it was truly Pariston on the other side. Her unusually locked door and delayed response told him she'd probably seen something as well, even before she took his hands in hers and whispered: "You saw it too?"

Pariston nodded and she let him in, still holding his hand, and closed her room's door on them and tried to turn the key three times but it only turned twice.

Outside, they could hear footsteps.

Not letting go of him, she trotted to the window, pushed her lacey drapes ever so slightly to the side, gazed out quickly to the yard outside then pulled the drapes shut again, turning to him with a finger to her mouth. "What do we do?"

Looking at Lillian was like looking at himself in a mirror, except the calm brown of his eyes stared at the turbulent, distressed deep blue of hers.

"We tell mom."

Then a turn of the doorknob made them both jump out of their skin and cling to each other with a death grip. Lillian was on the verge of tears, her shaking fingers digging into Pariston's arm.

"It's him it's him..." she muttered, her eyes wide open, fixed on the turning doorknob, pulling Pariston even closer to herself.

"Lillian?"

Their mom's voice.

"Lille, baby, is everything okay? Is Paris with you? He isn't in his room."

Pariston was trying to wrench his sister off him so he could go open the door but Lillian wouldn't budge, turning to him with features contorted in suspicion. "No no no, we don't know if it's mom."

"What do you mean?"

"There's more than one." Lillian whispered but then shrieked when the voice called again.

"Please open the door, I know both of you are there." Their mom or someone with her voice said. "I will be very cross with you if you don't."

Pariston, who was now having second thoughts about the identity of the knocker, stared at his sister.

A very long moment passed before the person on the other side of the door let out a long, droll sigh. "I know what you've seen, kids." She chuckled nervously. "I'm a little scared too, so can you let me in with you?"

Pariston couldn't take it anymore then. Even if it wasn't his mother but a terrible abomination instead, he was going to open the door. Lillian hung onto him, hiding behind his back as he walked towards the door, her feet dragging on the carpet.

Key turned once, twice, they cracked the door open.

A long gown grazing the wooden floor, manicured toenails, their eyes traveled up to look at their mother, staring down at them with her lovely, clear face, smiling amiably at their inquiring eyes.

She seemed to understand that they were still scared, so she didn't enter the room, only offered them her hand through the door crack.

"It's me, sweethearts."

Pariston and Lillian studied the hand, the long, spindly fingers, touched it, then became confident enough to hold it, big enough to wrap gently around both of theirs, and he knew then with unshakable certainty that it was his mom. It wasn't a stupid ghost.

They opened the door wide for her and stepped back where she knelt to the floor and opened her arms for them. They ran to her, burying their heads in her long golden hair.

"We saw a man!" Lillian cried, pulling back to hold their mother's face with her tiny hands. "And I saw a woman that looked like you!"

Their mom smiled. "They're just ghosts, baby."

This wasn't reassuring at all for Lillian, who grew even more scared. The little girl could deal, ultimately, if she had to, with people, but ghosts? How do you deal with ghosts?

Pariston put a hand on his mom's cheek and diverted her attention to him. "How do you know they're just ghosts?"

She caressed his hair. "Because I see them too, and so does Cici."

Pariston and Lillian gasped.

"Cici sees them too?" Lillian opened her mouth wide, turning their mom's face to her. "Mom! She sees them too?"

Their mom nodded. "Yeah, honey, and she's been seeing them for a long time."

The three stopped atop the rock slopes and looked back at the lake. It was even more beautiful from this altitude.

Pariston turned to his companions with a smile. They had been listening intently to him, and when he stopped to take a breath they looked annoyed, like someone had snatched the earphones out of their ears just when the chorus was about to hit.

"That put a lot of Cicilia's behavior in perspective for us." He said. "When Lillian and I were eight and seven respectively, Cicilia was 13 years old. That made her incomprehensible for us. You'd think I was the weirdo in the family but that wasn't the case at all." He laughed. "Believe it or not, I'm pretty conventional by Hill family standards."

"Of course _you_ wouldn't be the black sheep of the family," Cheadle rolled her eyes, but she didn't even attempt to hide her enjoyment of the story. "It has to be your haunted teenage sister."

Pariston hummed. He thought now that he and his two sisters each played the role of family reject and outcast, at one point. They'd toss the ball back and forth every couple of years, depending on whose life was the thorniest at any given period, to keep their mother sane, more or less.

"Were you the black sheep of your family, Cheadle?"

She only answered by tossing her head back and snorting mockingly.

"Do people on Whale Island believe in ghosts?"

"No, they believe in demons that suck your soul out of your ass if you sleep naked in the forest.”

"That explains a lot of things."

Ging only side-eyed him slyly.

And then Pariston felt a burning, needling curiosity about their families. He knew Ging has a son, no siblings but some kind of family back on their home island, but that was pretty much it. About Cheadle, he knew even less. By the time he met her she had already, it seemed, melted the snow behind her so that nobody could look over her shoulder to trace her footsteps, to see the house she left. Pariston knew what country she came from and when she was born, knew that her family, not unlike his, were moderately wealthy, but these were purposefully vague, negligible pieces of information she threw around every couple of years. That was it. Whether she had siblings or not, what her living situation was like, what her parents were like, Pariston knew nothing. He can hazard a couple guesses, of course, based on her personality, but unlike Ging who simply didn't care who went digging in his past and for what, Cheadle proved much hardier. She had buried her pre-Hunter life so deep it was legitimately difficult to trace any information about her and be sure, and Pariston knew that because he'd tried and tried often. Her knowledge and expertise in legal matters coupled with a short stint as a lawyer no doubt helped her bury the ledes even further. Transitioning from one gender to another probably helped, too. She knew what kind of documents people could go back to, so she most likely burned it all.

Those ingrates. He opens up and tells them an intimate family story only to have them give him the cold shoulder and become more distant. Was it the familial aspect of the story that alienated them? Was he reading this whole thing wrong?

"So," Ging started. "What happened after that?"

Walking closer to each other and entering the forest through a massive gate of mossy trees and arching branches, stepping into a long expanse of shade flecked by light columns, Pariston continued his tale.

As he talked, Cheadle went on looking through bushes and fissured tree bark.

"Now, I can't speak with certainty about what was going on with Cicilia," Pariston started, his feet skipping over mammoth roots jutting out of the soil. "But I can tell you what happened to me after that."

That fateful night, his mother held their hands, each one on either side of her, and walked with them through the whole house where they searched together for the earless man and other apparitions. Her footsteps were steady but her grip around Pariston's hand tight, and each time he looked up at her—more fascinated by her than any ghost—he saw that soft frown on her face, lips pursed, breathing steadily through her nose. She was brave, opening every closed door, even doors to rooms they didn't enter very often or at all, turning on the lights and walking with them to inspect every corner and closet, under the beds, behind the curtains, between the sofas, even inside the dusty fireplace in the shed. Then they walked together back to the bedrooms hallway where Pariston first saw the man and where moonlight still glowed beautifully through the open drapes. They were walking so slowly and carefully so as not to wake up Cici or dad upstairs. Especially dad, who didn't at all like to be disturbed in his sleep.

Once again, Cheadle interrupted for a logistical question. "So your mother, father, and older sister slept upstairs while you and your other sister each had your own rooms downstairs?"

"My mom slept downstairs too," Pariston said. "Each family member had a room of their own. Is that weird?"

Cheadle shrugged, on her way to climbing a tree to inspect some kind of nest or hive on a high branch.

"We had an arrangement." Pariston continued. "That was actually the first summer Lillian and I split rooms. Maybe that had something to do with us seeing the ghosts for the first time?"

When she answered, her voice echoed through the forest. "Maybe."

His dad, who didn't at all like to be disturbed from his sleep, didn't believe in these ghosts, his mom said.

Feet on dewy grass, themselves like ghosts wandering the premises, a tall woman and two children the spitting image of her, the three of them circled the house once, twice and 'once more', Lillian insisted.

They saw nothing.

Masters of the house again, they climbed back on the porch and snuggled together on the creaky swing, watching the field of sleeping sunflowers stretch under the moonlight, all the way to the poplar trees skirting their home.

"What if they are in the field?" Lillian asked, resting her tired head on their mother's chest.

"Then I'll just stay here and watch them for you."

Pariston looked out at the field, at the velvety, faded yellow of sunflower petals. "What do they want?"

His mother shook her head softly. "I don't know baby, I don't think they want anything." She said, patting his head, brushing his bangs away from his eyes. "Maybe this was their home, before we came."

"But it's our home!" Lillian jolted up with a determined frown. "We should tell them to leave. It's very rude they should come like this."

"It is, isn’t it?" Their mom chuckled, gazing at them each. "But until we know for sure we must stay brave, like we are now."

They nodded bravely.

"We mustn't tell dad, too." She said in a cheeky mutter, sharing with them one of her special smiles, one of many to come. "He's very busy and we shouldn't bother him with these silly things, right? Let's keep tonight our secret."

"But we tell Cici." Lillian said.

"Yes, we'll tell her." Their mom said. "We'll talk to her in the morning, then I'll make you pancakes, and we'll take the bikes out, and you'll wear your cute new dress." She tickled Lillian, making her laugh out loud, but then the two shushed each other, giggling behind their hands.

On the porch swing, the three spent another hour talking about summer games and weekend plans, their mother gently pulling their minds away from ghosts and scary hallways, caressing their hair and telling them stories, the cold summer breeze carrying towards them scents of geraniums and marigolds and gardenias, the raw, earthy smell of thousands of sunflower seeds inside rustling petals, the sounds of crickets and owls, and to the softness of it all Lillian fell asleep.

Pariston stayed up, and when it grew too cold they left the swing and entered the house, his little sister between his mom's arms, her chubby cheek squished on a sturdy shoulder. They put her in bed, covered her, then quietly left her room, closing the door behind them.

The two of them walked silently to his room where Pariston came to a stand beside his door, still cracked open, and faced his mother, wishing to speak more with her but not knowing about what. His head hurt him, but he didn't want to tell her about it.

His mother squatted so their faces were on the same level. She smiled at him. "I'm sorry you had to see all that, baby. I really am." Her long fingers brushed his hair and tucked it behind his ears. "You were very brave tonight, for your sister and me."

"Are you scared, mom?"

She shook her head. "Not when you're with me. If we stay together, nothing will ever hurt us, right?"

He stared at her. "Why don't you want to tell dad?"

Silent for a moment, his mom sighed. Even then, she rarely baby-talked him the way she did Lillian and seldom sugarcoated things for him; her young confidant, she didn’t shoo him to bed but grabbed his shoulders with cold hands and looked him in the eye.

"Your father has been very, very angry with me. I'm sure you’ve noticed." She said, her eyes a dark ocean. "You know how he trusts me to run household matters and handle bookkeeping in his absence and keep out of all other affairs, right, but I went and ran my mouth in the town hall the other day and some people weren't pleased at all with me."

"What did you say?"

She chuckled, seemed unsure whether he'd understand or not, tapped his shoulders with brittle fingers. "I spoke in favor of a condemned marriage. Sarah Kierg, you remember her, right? How she eloped with a Yurwan man?” He nodded. “I defended her."

It's only later that Pariston came to understand the gravity of that, the ramifications of it, the stone his mother had pulled from the wall. It seemed so simple, even simpler that she didn't care at all about politics, racial or otherwise, and was driven solely by the desire to live a good, comfortable life devoid of conflict, a desire that was soon going to be withered to nothing.

Her humble, timid defense of a runaway bride was going to haunt her for the rest of her life on Gutedel.

"You understand, Paris, baby? I made an honest mistake, talking of things I don’t understand." She twirled a lock of his hair around her finger. "Dad’s been very upset, but it's because he wants the best for all of us. Besides," she smiled, that smile she only reserved for her kids, childish and irreverent and utterly naive. "If we are on our best behavior, he will leave sooner, hmm? We don't want him to worry about us, Paris, do we?"

Mechanically, he shook his head and smiled. His mother groaned from sheer adoration, pinching and kissing his face and ruffling his hair. Pariston giggled under her onslaught of affection.

"You're the best boy in the whole world," she kissed his forehead. "Now off to bed, go. Want me to keep the hallway lights on for you?"

Pariston slunk back into his bed, his soft sheets cold against his toes. He shook his head. "Can you close the door too?"

"Are you sure?"

He nodded.

"Alright, goodnight sweetheart."

In the dimness of his room and the wafting moonlight, Pariston laid on his back and covered his mouth and nose with the blanket, only his eyes blinking to the ceiling of his room.

From the corner of his eye he saw him, standing beside the door.

The earless man.

He didn't look.

Cheadle gathered a handful of big red ants in a vial. They clacked and screeched. "All the side characters in this story are more interesting than you, frankly. Including the ghosts."

A couple feet away from her, Ging was hunched over the soil, tracing the footprints of some animal or other.

Pariston laughed. "Are they? Let's do it as a choose your own adventure then!" He looked at them each, and watched them come to a stop.

In the forest, they were nothing, three people bound together only by a story. "You pick one of these characters, including me of course, and we'll follow them. But! Once you choose one path, you can't go back to hear the others." He smiled. "How about it?"

"What if we choose differently?" Ging asked.

"You must come to a consensus."

Cheadle and Ging looked at each other for a while, then back at him. He was excited because he didn't know what they were going to choose but knew they had different ideas in mind, and was surprised when they just shrugged and answered in unison.

"You."

More than happy to oblige, Pariston continued.

"So, after my first encounter with the earless man, ghost appearances became more common around the house. We saw them every other night..."

And tried to speak with them, but to no avail. The ghosts didn't speak and didn't respond, even when they appeared in amiable moods. After the earless man, Pariston saw the other two ghosts, and they were five in total, two of which he never met (he teased Ging and Cheadle that if they'd chosen Cicilia as a character he would've told them about those two other ghosts); the ghost of a woman who only looked like his mother from far away, and the ghost of the blind ancient lady who lived in Cicilia's room and slept in her bed, who would not let Cici in and when she did let her in would not let her out.

From that night on and until he was sixteen, Pariston shared his house for nine years with ghosts. They even started in-jokes among themselves such as "don't drop your ears" before bed, "the other mother" in regards to his mother's doppelganger, and "I'll feed you to ghoul grandma upstairs if you cut my barbie's head again!".

And as promised that first night, not only did they not tell his father but also told nobody else so that he and his mother and sisters lived a singular state that was between reality and fiction, more so that nobody outside their small circle knew or could corroborate facts.

For a time, Pariston imagined the four of them were living some kind of collective psychosis, one big lie, reinforcing each other's delusions and hallucinations, cut off from any semblance of reality, their perception completely and utterly reliant on that of the others, especially that his mother had gone and said what she said in the town hall, turning them subtly into little bit of outcasts, since now, apparently, Revanche Hill (young wife of general Elias Hill, you know her, she thinks she's so pretty) 'encourages and supports miscegenation'.

At least, that's what people kept saying. No matter how much she tried to rectify her noble stance or go back on her defense of Sarah Krieg or double down on support for land confiscation or devote herself to extreme expressions of tearful racial sentiments at every opportunity, that reputation stuck to her, which, paradoxically, made her a popular socialite back in Caledonia, once her original stance gained true political and social momentum, transforming her within certain circles in the capital into a progressive political figure ahead of her time, a title she accepted with clumsiness if not a little delight.

A juicy subject and irresistible centerpiece in dinner evenings and dance parties, Revanche learned to weave the haunted house story to perfection, recounting it over and over again to the amazement of dozens of polite society trash. And she enjoyed all of it.

But back when they were still in Gutedel, under the shroud of silent, mysterious ghosts in the house and the haunting gossip outside it, she grew and sharpened her fangs. So did Pariston.

"A few batmonkeys seem to have slept here recently," Ging stood beside a huddling of relatively small maka trees which hid small gathering and resting areas among their branches and big, oval leaves. "Something's weird though."

They were standing in the middle of a small clearing situated within a depression, dotted with a couple drying water pools, swarmed by flying insects that glimmered under the rich sunlight pouring down on the clearing, zipping back and forth over the water like big dust motes.

"They left their food here, and the floor is warm." Ging said, his body squeezed high among the tangled branches of sap trees, his eyes peering into the comfortable spots of shades where those primates must've enjoyed leisure time. He pushed his body through and disappeared into the wooden maze.

Pariston glanced at Cheadle to find her alone trekking down the depression towards the water, her sudden presence agitating the flying insects and sending them in every other direction. Was she going to get herself stung again?

"Why are they called batmonkeys anyway?" Pariston asked, preferring to join Cheadle at the pond mostly because of sunlight. "Do they have wings and suck blood?"

"No, but they hang from trees and have similar roosting and mating patterns to known bat species." She bent down to inspect the algae-green, murky surface, stuck a finger in the water and stirred it, filling a vial with it. There seemed to be something she didn't like.

As the world suddenly fell deathly silent around them, she looked up at him. "Where's Ging?"

As if he heard her, Ging's voice sounded from the tangled trees above them. "Hey, you might want to see this." Only his arm appeared, beckoning them to climb up.

In the cool shade of the batmonkey sanctuary, Pariston and Cheadle kneeled before a strange sight and a terrible smell.

Dozens of dead batmonkeys, some mummified in rot, their fur scarce and matted, their skin visible under, putrid with deep ulcers and blisters. Others the same, but alive.

This was familiar.

"Is it safe to be in this confined space without masks or gloves?" Pariston wondered, his body as far away as possible within the space from this open mass grave.

"No," Cheadle said. "But it's a calculated risk. We can't work around here in heavy hazmat suits, can we?"

Still amazed at how she could pull out nearly anything from her freezer tank, he watched her carefully encase the creatures in cinch bags, choosing the ones still alive. Their bodies have wasted so much that their size presented no capacity problem.

But something else was amiss.

A water that ought to have settled, a seemingly abandoned resting site that's still warm and filled with food.

Pariston recognized they were in a trap, watched from every corner by hundreds of invisible eyes.

"They won't like that we bagged their brethren." Ging said. "They remember individual faces and hold grudges."

Cheadle sighed. "I want to draw blood from healthy ones as well. What do you recommend we do?"

The ground trembled under their feet, the sounds of an oncoming rampage grew closer. The three just looked at each other for one last calm moment.

Ging smiled. "I recommend we run away for now."

A dozen batmonkeys flew down at them from overhanging branches.

The three burst out from the tree sanctuary, behind them a broken pipe of raging, screaming monkeys, an avalanche of fur and crazy big eyes and even bigger fangs.

Scrambling down the tree and out of the depression, Pariston couldn't stop staring at the way nature around them blew up, the way silence turned into chaos, how batmonkeys tore through branches and leaves, their muscled arms and gaping mouths a dark void swallowing the green of the forest.

The three ran so fast, bolting out of the clearing with mindless, tense legs, the scenery along with any sense of direction diminishing as batmonkeys descended on them from every nook and cranny, their long arms trying to grab a piece of them.

"Why did they set a trap for us?" Cheadle yelled, running with a body laden with the weight of the many things she'd collected.

"I think they suspect us!" Ging answered, and then groaned. "I bet they've been aware of our presence since yesterday."

"We need to set a cage trap to catch some!"

"We don't have time!" Ging turned around and punched a monkey so hard he sent it back to knock away dozens of others. He didn't look happy with having to hurt these monsters. "Think of something now. If we set a conventional capture trap with bait, they'll see that one or two of them fell for it and the rest won't approach it anymore. They're pretty smart."

"They were using their dead as bait, right?" Pariston asked, almost tripping when one of the monkeys suddenly leapt over his head with a deafening screech.

"Seems so."

They dodged and punched and kicked their way among the hordes of vengeful apes, and his body was pumping so much adrenaline Pariston burst out laughing.

"Cheadle, think!"

"I'll shoot them with the tranquilizer, but you'll have to protect me while I collect samples."

"I'll do it!" Pariston said. "Throw me your equipment."

"No!" Cheadle shouted, ducking under one monkey, grabbing another by the leg and flinging it away from her body.

"You taught me how to do it, didn't you?" Pariston yelled back, irked at her lack of faith.

Cheadle snorted. "Not with angry rampaging animals I didn't!"

"I can do it." He insisted. "You two are stronger than me, you'd be better at protecting me."

"Pariston's right!" Ging cried out. "You and me will split and use _Zetsu_ , this will draw them only to him. You gun them down from afar while he sticks needles."

Cheadle's eyes shone with an idea. "Use the mist net! We'll drop it at them from above. It won't hold for long but it will help capture them long enough to draw blood."

Frantically, she pulled out the compressed net from her bag and threw it to him. "What will you do after you drop it?"

Ging grabbed it and laughed. "I'll fight."

Cheadle nodded, unstrapping her trusty leather roll from her waist and tossing it to Pariston. He caught it midair before it fell in the hands of an opportunistic shit monkey, kicking the animal away from him.

"Ging traps, I tranquilize, you draw blood." She glared at him. "You better be fast!"

The tranquilizer requires reloading after every three shots, so in that intermittent period Pariston not only has to stick three needles through the mesh trap, wait long enough to draw blood then change them, he will also have to plunge his hands into the frenzy of biting, scratching, possibly-diseased animals and risk infection all without damaging either the syringes or the animal.

Pariston breathed, and in a split second, Ging and Cheadle weren't at his side anymore.

Alone before a surging wave of madness, he continued running, his eyes glancing up to see Ging's body leaping soundlessly between thick tree limbs, both of them searching for a perfect spot to stop and drop the net. Cheadle was nowhere to be seen.

Pariston will just have to trap himself in a corner and trust the other two won't leave him for dead.

Already uncapping syringes, he looked at his hands, glimpsed the bite marks on his knuckles. They have healed completely but left ugly, swirly shapes behind them. They were steady, cold, and he wasn't scared.

At age thirteen, the earless man visited him but in a different reincarnation, one of actual, touchable human flesh who not only listened intently but also talked: an in-home psychologist (and no doubt his mother's insistence on calling the man 'psychologist' instead of 'therapist' was due to fear that her children might think they're ill or something.)

Of course, Pariston was displaying 'troubling anti-social behavior' way before age thirteen, but that was the year his mother had decided that maybe all her kids should see someone who could make sense of them for her, perhaps having given up on understanding them herself, especially him—her special, fragile sunflower who either 'loved her too much' or 'didn't love her at all'.

He remembered vividly meeting the man—a 'friend', his mother called him—and being taken aback for a minute upon noticing the missing ear on the left side, exactly like the earless man.

Although this one was younger and of a handsomer visage, ever since then Pariston considered them one and the same.

That man also stuck needles in him.

Against a mossy furrow between two massive, conjoined trees, Pariston came to a halt, pivoted, and watched the mist net descend in front of him on about fifty batmonkeys, stronger and more solid than it would be otherwise, encased with Ging's nen.

Inside the net, the batmonkeys bounced and scrambled, screeching and screaming, trying to tear at the nen-hardened mesh that flattened them to the ground and at the man nearest to them. Pariston didn't step back from them, even when he saw that familiar fog in the corners of his eyes, that heat spiraling in his temples, sudden and piercing.

A sharp, swishing sound cut through the air. One of the monkeys fell to the ground, an arrow needle in its thigh, numbed.

Then another, and another.

Pariston began working.

Like Cheadle taught him in the lab, only more fun. The risk he was currently mired in was so thrilling that he almost forgot his surroundings, sinking into the technical delicacy of his task, the preciseness of it, not a sliver of apprehension in his body, even when sharp, curved teeth threatened to gnaw off his fingers. One needle after the other, tubes of blood lined in leather one by one.

Furious beasts surrounded him on every side, dimming his vision, screaming and growling, trying to free their captured brethren.

He felt nothing, nothing. His migraine crackled like broken firewood.

"Do you feel that your chronic headaches make you aggressive?"

"No."

"Your mother told me they are very painful."

"They are."

"What do you think makes you act aggressively sometimes, Pariston?"

"Nothing."

"You confessed to me last week that you direct most of your aggression towards your mother and sisters. Do you feel that they've hurt you in some way?"

"They never hurt me."

"How do you feel about them?"

"I love them very much."

"Do you think this love is what compels you to bursts of violence? Do you feel your selfhood threatened by this love?"

"I don't feel threatened by anything."

"Does this love you have for them scare you, Pariston?"

He didn't say anything for a long minute, staring, as he always did, at the hole in the left side of the man's head.

"Nothing scares me."

Everything was a dark, rough void, and then Ging pulled him out of the pile of batmonkeys.

Holding Pariston awkwardly between his arms, Ging jumped away from the bloodthirsty frenzy of sharp fangs and sharper nails, and Cheadle leapt down from a high branch to their side, her tranquilizer gun over her shoulder, and immediately went about removing the arrows from the numbed animals, forgoing the mist net, torn and useless.

Now that they got what they wanted, the two were finally willing to use nen to subjugate the beasts into fear and drive them away.

Still dangling terribly uncomfortably over Ging's shoulder while a group of stubborn batmonkeys followed in their trail, Pariston laughed, alive. “That was fun!” He brandished the heavy leather roll. "I can always count on being your favorite character."

"Did you get bitten or scratched?" Cheadle asked him.

"No, nothing."

She smiled, her hair billowing in waves behind her as they continued to run away, seeking a calm spot to rest and collect themselves.

Finally in a safer place, an old, rutted path among the trees that signaled the presence of once-occupied human settlements, the three came to a stop, the sounds of raging monkeys far behind them, echoing through the forest, giving way to the gentler twittering and singing of birds.

Ging put him down on the ground with a heavy sigh and stood over him, rolling his shoulder to relieve it of pressure. "What the hell got into you?"

"What do you mean?"

"You completely spaced out." Cheadle said, setting her things on the forest floor and immediately opening her bag to pull out something. "It's like you weren't there at all, psychologically. You were surrounded on every side but it's like you were alone in a room."

"Is something wrong with the samples?"

"No," she shook her head and sat beside him, pulled up his sleeves and poured water all over his forearms, then handed him a piece of soap. Once he finished scrubbing and drying from elbows to fingertips, she took his hands in hers and applied the antiviral solution to them. "They're perfect."

Pariston stared down at her disinfecting his hands, even though he had managed to avoid bites and scratches. "I don't know, I was just immersed in the work." He smiled at them. "I didn't feel anything."

Ging flopped down on the ground opposite them. "You look fevered."

"I do?" Pariston touched his forehead. The fog in his eyes had dissipated but left in its wake an incessant, sharp pulsing.

What did this sudden return mean? He truly believed upon waking up without a migraine that he would spend the day free of it, like what usually happened, but it clearly wasn't the case. He glanced at Cheadle, trying to read her mood, trying to discern his state from hers. She looked emotionally distant and mentally preoccupied, already turning away from them to dote over her samples.

Even when she seemed perfectly calm and not unpleased with him now, it didn't make his headache go away. Was it because she used her nen, and every time she used hers she was also, in a way, using his? But moods and various mental states affect nen all the time and vice versa. What Pariston sensed around the southern settlement baths with the soldiers was different from what he sensed minutes ago, when they ran away with him. What felt like poisonous slime then had turned into something else, something lighter, because the uncertainty and tension of that encounter were different from this one.

Half-witted, horny soldiers and crazy, vengeful batmonkeys weren't all that dissimilar, but Cheadle certainly felt different about them. Perhaps, she felt differently about him, too.

Still, it didn't make his headache go away.

It didn't occur to Pariston to consider his own emotions and mental state in the equation, because rarely was he not in a good mood or a perfectly lucid state of mind. Even when he was dogpiled by hundreds of screeching apes, he felt, if he truly did feel anything, wholly calm and focused, poised and clear. Rarely upset, rarely distressed, rarely experiencing any strong negative emotions, Pariston implicated himself at that moment much less than he suspected Cheadle and the culpability of her sheer presence.

From the corner of his eye, he saw Ging staring at him staring at Cheadle. He turned to him with a smile. "Thanks for pulling me out of there, by the way."

"Sure."

The two of them exchanged laden gazes for a long moment, and he couldn't tell what the other man was thinking, then Cheadle noticed their weird silence and lifted her eyes to look at them, and so they all spent a good minute just exchanging weird, guarded looks.

His nen was on everybody’s mind. He could tell.

Now Pariston wondered if she suspected anything strange with him—more, if he should just ask for help. He had succeeded in keeping this little weakness to himself for years, among hundreds of sharp-eyed, perceptive Hunters, Ging included. Nobody knew and Pariston never thought there will ever come a day where he'll tell anybody, or be in so much pain it just slips out of him.

"We should keep moving." Cheadle stood up after making sure all the important items were still on her. "We're close to the settlements."

And the deeper they ventured into the carved footpath among lush fauna, the more they encountered signs of a once-active human presence—construction materials, more primitive dirt roads, wood and concrete structures that stood suspended in time, neither demolished nor finished, tools that sunk in the soil, rusted and dulled, and all around it animals hopped and chirped and crawled, observing them curiously from the sides of the road, deer and hogs and even, far away, Ging pointed with a smile, a huge crested bear trotting with her two cubs.

Was there ever a place for humans in the continent? Everywhere Pariston looked there were signs of their rejection and collective stubbornness in the face of that rejection. How valuable was resistance in the face of a land that at once gave a lot and absolutely nothing? Did any human efforts have meaning, was any of this worth it?

Those who stayed here in somewhat large numbers to settle and colonize survived only slightly longer than smaller groups of adventurers and explorers.

By themselves, Ging, Cheadle and Pariston wouldn't be able to build a community, let alone a whole town. Three people can't make a system and can't run a government, can't create necessary institutions or operate them to sustain even a semblance of a society.

Pariston liked to imagine the kinds of institutional, logistical struggles the people in these settlements must’ve gone through. He knew of the 'elected council system' that prince Harkenburg was hoping to establish in each settlement as a nucleus for further development and expansion, a governing body that ran settlement matters, provided stable administrative structure, allocated jobs and distributed resources among a growing populace.

Pariston had to give Sulei Fell—and Clarence Coll before her—some credit, for managing to steer their settlement away from total collapse, to keep it running semi-coherently on minimum resources and largely unskilled labor.

Many Hunters live their entire lives never even glimpsing the complex mazes of bureaucracy that keep their association up and running. They don't see the hundreds of interns and desk people and office drones that receive thousands of daily mission offers, handle complaints, dismiss lawsuits, receive and send emails, respond to clients, document and carry out every order on an administrative level, buy and sell land and property, track not only hundreds of license purchases daily but also follow closely the state and activity of everything owned by the Association from small dingy restaurants to the biggest nature reserves, invest in international companies, exchange stocks, screen and process exam applications, update the website hundreds of times daily where they post news, charts, polls and statistics, fact check claims, update profiles, and notify of missing or dead Hunters; collect and edit material for the online magazine and for its physical prints, maintain the vital, vast, and rich Association archives both virtual and material, protect the copyrights and patents of Hunters, deal personally at times with prissy state officials from client nations, handle the Association's yearly budget and spending, make minute logistical decisions like one massive beehive that keeps this body politic powerful and influential.

Hunters aren't the people who run their Association, and this is by design. Even when Pariston believed strongly that their Association was poorly operated, he still recognized the necessary truth behind this arcane machinery—in order for all this to remain standing, Hunters had to be afforded absolute freedom from white-collar concerns. The only thing asked of them, conspicuously, is to be the best in their field so that money can continue to pour in. Without Hunters like Ging and Cheadle and Pariston, people at the top of their fields generating exorbitant amounts of money on a regular basis and depositing a share of their earnings into the Association's funds, there wouldn't be a single rookie Hunter with money in his bank account. The shocking wealth new Hunters come into is truly just pocket change. The more successful and effective a Hunter is, the more everyone invests in them; even when they aren't actively involved in a project, checks still come in their name. It was enough for Pariston to endorse even a corner kiosk for investors to come crawling on hands and knees. The better a Hunter is, the more expensive they become; their time is money, and if a Hunter was in a particularly bad mood, a single word with them could cost gold.

Besides that, there was a brutal, calculated absence of a safety net. There is, of course, and after plenty of lobbying (the first time he and Cheadle worked on the same proposition) medical care offered for Hunters. After all, you can't brandish a broken weapon and be taken seriously. But it didn't come with health insurance, and there were no pensions; if a Hunter wants to retire, they do it on their own dime. If a Hunter lost their license for good, that's it for them. If a Hunter announced bankruptcy, they better climb their way back to the top with their teeth. If you fall and crash, there's no helping it. There are no compensations for any kind of failure. Hunters were imperceptibly encouraged to do bigger and better projects, and some simply become too big to fail, and therefore stand under a mountain of pressure, and the larger the mountain the harder you'll get crushed.

A Hunter's only refuge was other Hunters, not the Association that makes them masters of the world. A fellow Hunter can pay your debts, lend you money, vouch for you, find you new jobs, help you back on your feet, and save your life. Pariston knew that because he did it for dozens of Hunters who sought his help and protection. This was also part of the system. The illusion of the lone wolf Hunter who needs nobody was just that, an illusion; Hunters created an organic, complex support network precisely because the Association didn't readily offer them one. 'Friends, colleagues and life partners' isn't a clause in the contract and you don't get them as an added benefit with your freshly-minted license—you had to go out there and gain them yourself.

After years of relentless work, of misadventures and misbehavior, and after being crushed by the mountain, this was what Pariston had—two people he couldn't run an association with.

But three people were enough to build a kingdom and destroy several.

Each in their own worlds, they spent the better part of their wanderings in silence, lonely scavengers entering even lonelier spaces in search of nothing and everything. Pariston's head continued to send tiny jolts of pain through his skull, but it was a tame headache.

Every now and then, Cheadle checked on the living specimen she carried, specifically the batmonkeys still alive, barely, in their bags. She hadn't taken the dead ones, because they might become mere dirt by the time she returned to the settlement, just like Gregory's body had dissipated into dust.

Resting on the sloping, collapsed roof of a small settlement house overtaken by moss and a flowering, curling ivy, shaded by a leaning tree branch, she took her dying batmonkeys out and injected them with something. They jittered, their eyes bulged, their fingers contorted, tails swayed and froze. She bagged them again.

Anything to keep them alive long enough to make the journey back.

Pariston glanced down under his feet, at the house floor exposed to the elements through the crumbling roof. A big puddle of water, and an animal that looked like some canid scouting with ginger steps around it. The canid's ears perked up, it lifted its head, sensing the man who's been staring down at it, in her bloodied mouth hung a rabbit like the ones they ate yesterday, its supple flesh impaled on pointy teeth.

Inside a crack in the wall within the house, from the way the animal angled its body as if to conceal something, he glimpsed four tiny puppies, huddled together in their fuzzy brownish gray fur.

A mom.

She bared her bloody teeth at him through her prey. Pariston smiled at her.

Ging too had noticed the puppies, and his eyes met Pariston's with an endearing smile. "They're so cute." He mouthed, aware that the smallest sound will agitate the mother.

To his side, Cheadle was in a private bubble. Having ascertained that everything is still intact and in place, her gaze was now far away, fixed absentmindedly on the leaning tree branch, on the dangling leaves that almost brushed her nose, like they were whispering something to her.

And like the canid in the house, she too sensed his gaze on her and turned her head slightly to regard him with blank eyes. "We should get going."

What seemed like a momentary willingness to prolong the journey was now replaced with her usual promptitude. No more day or two of patiently collecting samples and frolicking around the lake. They were going to explore the settlements now instead of waiting till nightfall, she said, then they will continue to Don's house without a night's rest. They'll camp somewhere else when they're tired and then go on moving.

When Ging reminded her that a rainstorm might hit tonight, she didn’t listen.

On the way towards the settlements, she walked a good few feet ahead. Pariston and Ging walked side by side.

"What's up with her?" He asked.

Ging shrugged. "Why don't you go ask her."

"I'm asking you."

He gave Pariston a look. "I don't have a hotline to her mind."

"Maybe she's feeling guilty, seeing those infected animals."

"Maybe."

“Or guilty about last night.”

“Possibly.”

Pariston stopped. “Why were you giving me these weird looks, after we escaped the batmonkeys?”

"You know."

"Maybe I don’t. Give me a hint."

Ging came to a stop, too. "When you were completely blacked out, mentally, Cheadle’s nen acted weird. Did you feel anything?” Pariston nodded. “I sensed it flaring into something that didn't feel the way her nen usually feels, but something closer to yours." He gazed away from Pariston for a moment. "Not yours entirely, but close to it. I think I noticed it quicker now because I experience it daily, the way nen responds to chronic pain."

“Responds to chronic pain?” Pariston echoed, then a smile dawned on his face. “You mean—”

“Was it a headache?”

Pariston’s eyes widened. “Yes. Did her aura flow give it away?”

“Kinda. Are they consistent?”

“Yeah.”

“Since when?”

“Since forever.” Pariston laughed, then fell into silence. "You said 'not yours entirely'. What do you mean by that?"

"I mean it's a bizarro blend of yours, hers, and a mixture of the two."

Pariston glanced ahead, at Cheadle's distant figure. "She must’ve felt it too."

"She probably did."

"What does that mean for us, Cheadle and I?"

Ging resumed walking. "You and Cheadle are experiment subjects. You know the outcome of the nen shackles in your case, first of its kind, could shape policy for decades to come. If the results turn out too dangerous and risky, it will be blacklisted, but if you get back your nen like you never lost it, maybe an age will be ushered where the aura of criminals is considered a serious matter of the law and an ‘asset’ that can be confiscated, like they did your companies and houses. But," he went on. "Nen isn't a finite resource; it's self-generating and reactive. It's not like you just have five kilos of nen and Cheadle is hiding them in her millions of pockets. It's not your nen that's dormant but your aura nodes. Your body is still generating aura but transfers it to her instead, thanks to the shackles, so when you were in extreme pain, your aura reacted, but from her body."

"Every time I'm in pain, she feels it."

Ging snickered. "Don't put it so romantically. I don't think that's the case. Perhaps it would've been for somebody with weaker nen or less proficiency. She's contained yours for ten years without enduring any visible damage to hers, nothing I can pinpoint so far, anyway.” He looked at Pariston. “Cheadle also has the advantage of open, healthy nodes. I wouldn't be surprised if recuperation happened and she's simultaneously benefiting and hurting from your aura in some way, maybe in ways she doesn't even recognize. Your nen might be making hers more effective in some areas and less effective in others. If what I sensed was precise, simultaneous interference and integration could definitely be happening, and the length of time here might have played a role as well."

"Ergo?"

"Ergo no matter what turns out to be the case, you two are in it together." Ging said, frowning. "Look, who fucking knows, this entanglement might turn out to be completely benign, and you get back your nen fully, but I doubt it." He pinned Pariston with a more serious look this time. "Worst case scenario is Cheadle gives you back your nen and loses hers; her body might react negatively to this sudden loss and shut off her nodes in defense, which could lead to two possibilities: either you get your nen and she loses hers, or both of you lose it permanently. I don't favor this one, but it's on the table. There are other possibilities, all of them suck for both of you, but the least awful one, and the one I’m betting the most on, is that you regain your nen along with some of hers, which will mean she also gets to keep some of yours, not necessarily 50-50, and you two will have to configure new ways of managing and using your aura." Ging lifted his hands, placing each finger against its opposite. "Your affinities won't play nice with you, either, so you have to take that into account as well. Conjuration and Manipulation are separated on the chart by Specialization, which lowers both your efficiencies in the other's natural affinity by 20 percent. Ever conjured something?"

Pariston shook his head. "No."

"Cheadle uses Manipulation." Ging said. "It's vital for her work. This makes her the better nen user. And even if she weren't, she still has an edge on you, having not lost her nen for a damn decade. While you were drinking tea and baking cookies, she was developing and improving her techniques, probably with your nen as well. Do you know what that means?" Side by side again, the sun lower in the sky. "If the first, best scenario is what happens, you'll have to work fast not just to catch up to her and me, but also learn an affinity you're only 60 percent efficient in and maximize it as far as you can. And that's you being lucky. There's another possibility that interests me, too." Ging walked backward to face him, his eyes gleaming with an old thought. "If you regain your nen blended with hers, there's a small chance one or both of you might access Specialization."

Pariston smiled. "And that's us being _very_ lucky?"

"Not necessarily." Ging shrugged. "Personally, I find Specialization limiting, but most natural-born specialists are smart enough to make something interesting out of the meager hand they're dealt.” He tilted his head, still prancing backwards. “A gradual progression into an affinity through training is one thing, waking up to find yourself belonging to another affinity all together would probably be a serious pain in the ass, especially for someone like Cheadle. Again, who knows, you might regain your nen only to discover you've become a full-blooded conjurer and can't deploy any of your old hatsu for shit."

Pariston glanced once again at Cheadle. She stopped and glanced back too.

"What should I do?"

"For now? Get close with her." Ging's eyes shifted from him to her then back to him. "And I don't mean it in your cloying chummy opportunistic kind of way, I mean the real shit. Bonding. Friendship. Whatever the weird stuff that gets you two off when I’m not looking. Know her for her and not for what you might _get_ from her if you're a nice boy.” He smiled. “You had sex last night, so you’re already halfway there, anyway. Although good stuff can occasionally backfire."

Pariston hummed. “So you think physical proximity could potentially mitigate any unfortunate side effects of nen separation?”

“It’s a factor.” Ging said. “How you both feel about each other is more important.”

"I thought her moods and emotions have something to do with my headaches, and I was constantly trying to compare how she's feeling to the level of pain I'm experiencing." Pariston started. "But I was already beginning to doubt that's the case. Yesterday, when we were having sex, the pain was completely gone in a way I haven't felt since we arrived here, so I thought 'maybe because she's feeling good', and I thought this was affirmed today morning, when the pain was still gone. It remained absent until I set to work on drawing blood.” He looked at Ging. “This made me confused. If my proximity to her and therefore my nen is the reason, then I ought to be in pain all the time, but I'm not. If her moods affect my pain, then my headache should've flared when you two fought yesterday, but it remained at a consistent, bearable level, even after you made up. And all this makes me think now that perhaps—and maybe it was just the chemicals—it was feeling good together during sex that was actually effective." He smiled brightly. "So maybe you do have a point!"

Ging shrugged. "When the time is right and she needs you, she'll give you back your nen. What happens after that is anybody’s guess."

"Why do you suddenly care about this?" Pariston asked. "I was sure you weren't going to broach the subject or interfere in any way."

"I don't 'suddenly' care about anything; it's an interesting case no matter the outcome, and I've been curious about the subject for years." Ging said. "Doesn’t mean I will interfere; I won't ask Cheadle to give you back your nen or middle in your business in favor of one or the other. It has nothing to do with me, and the farthest away I am from this mess the better for everyone. I'm just sharing my predictions with you to put some of what you experience in context."

"And what's in it for you, if Cheadle and I become good buddies?"

Ging offered him a dry smile. "Peace of mind, for one."

"Are you annoyed by us?" Pariston asked in an offhand manner, he was after all absolutely willing to annoy Ging more if the answer was yes, but he was also simply interested in knowing whether their presence had any special bearing on someone who conducted a good portion of his life alone. "I mean, I wouldn't blame you if you were. Cheadle and I are a handful, aren't we?"

"It doesn't matter if you annoy me or not," Ging shrugged. "We're here now. I chose you, I'll have to deal with you either way." His eyes twinkled. "I don’t pull my cards at random."

"Of course, the trickier the cards in your hands, the graver the risk yet bigger the reward."

Ging smiled. "So don't go thinking I'm some generous old pal who gave you a second chance at life out of sheer selflessness. I have my own agenda."

"And I respect that."

"Thanks."

Side by side, they reached Cheadle. She had been standing still, waiting for them, some of the coldness in her eyes dissipated in favor of something more urgent.

Surrounded by the remnants of abandoned, crumbling single floor housing units nestled in a clearing that's been stripped of its massive trees and other plants to make way for settlements and roads, she recommended they split and search around, already doubting that the refugees originated here.

Pariston tried to envision the settlement from above, the placement of housing units and the distance between each one, the sameness of every half-standing cube making it both harder and easier to see the power structure that had once held this place together.

Waterways had been dug along with wells and underground water tanks all around the area, and under his feet was an entire irrigation and water storage system that fed the whole settlement from the lake. He followed the dried up narrow tunnels to reach the main tank. Over his head, Ging stood on a nearby roof.

"You did explore this place before, no?" Pariston asked, covering his eyes from the glaring, misty sun. "Any idea what happened to the residents?"

"Disease, water poisoning, frequent predator attacks, unexplained disappearances, an internal conflict." Ging said. "People don't just leave their homes for one single reason. I imagine multiple issues compounded and caused any remaining residents to leave."

Pariston jumped in place, making sure the ground under his feet really was as hollow as he first sensed. It was. "It's strange, isn't it, to be alone in a settlement is scarier than being alone in the woods." He kicked the soil with his foot, pushing mounds of it aside to see what was hidden under the blanket of dirt. A massive wooden board.

"A forest owes one nothing, but a place that's meant to protect you, once it dissolves it becomes quite frightening, right?"

"I wouldn't know," Ging said, leaping from the roof to a close tree branch, swinging from it to a lower one, then letting go to land on the ground beside him. "I never owned a house in my life."

Pariston's eyes widened. "You're joking."

"Nope."

"Not even on your home island?"

"That's my grandma's house."

"Woof." Pariston smiled, bemused, bending down to drag aside the heavy wood board. "I shouldn’t be this surprised."

Ging didn't say anything for a good moment, helping him push the board. "Why buy a house I won't live in? I rent apartments through the Association website if I have to, or sleep in motels, or crash on a friend's couch. I never really needed a house."

Pariston made a face, but it hardly had anything to do with the terrible smell that wafted up at them once the board was pushed aside, revealing a water tank, its void of a mouth blowing putrid air that's been trapped inside for years, the heavy lid falling down and kicking up dirt in their faces.

He couldn't imagine, ever, spending a night in a dingy filthy motel, it would kill him inside, and he had no friends whose couches he could sleep on. He did use the Association's apartment renting system on several occasions, regrettably, but he never spent a night in any. He considered them more of scouting start points than shelters, utilizing them solely for missions and gathering info.

His mossy, distorted reflection staring back at him from the water surface, Pariston thought that every house he ever bought was rooted in a deep, primordial desire to replicate the feel of his childhood home in Gutedel. Nothing came close, so he contented himself with the fleeting thrill of buying a big house, redesigning it in his image, live in it for approximately a week or two each year, and when finally bored with it, sell it.

"Smells like a hundred sweaty farmers." Pariston chuckled, turned around to search for Cheadle. Where was she? He wanted to continue his ghost story, the filthy water reminding him of another chapter.

Ging looked around, found a stick and used it to stir the water, disturbing the swampy surface, the foamy ripples wafting out an even more terrible odor. That didn't stop him however. Like a dirty boy playing in mud he got himself a longer stick and dug it deeper in the water, perhaps hoping to reach the bottom, then pulled it out like one pulls a sword out of a sheath, the wood of the stick covered completely in muck and guck, its disgusting thick gray gook dripping to the ground between their feet.

"Let's see," Ging murmured, holding the dribbling stick to his eyes to inspect.

The only thing Pariston could tell for certain was that torn, filthy pieces of clothes dangled from it.

"Don't touch it with your hands." Came Cheadle's voice, appearing from a corner behind one of the houses and on her way to them.

Ging's hand hung in the air, his fingers about to seize a piece of something entirely featureless.

She was wearing that glove again, the one with which she determined the mattress in their settlement room was just dusty and not infested with a million diseases. Now Pariston wondered if it was a conjured object, if she could use it to scan for illnesses or infectious agents. But if so, why wasn't she using it in the settlement, in the isolation ward and the lab? It occurred to him that she didn't actually utilize her nen all that much, preferring to rely on traditional lab methodology. Did his presence have something to do with this reticence? She wouldn't risk sacrificing lives just so he wouldn't see her nen abilities, would she? He knew of conjurers who conjure multiple objects, few as they were, but he didn't know the limit, and supposed it was relative anyway, contingent on various factors from the strength and proficiency of the user to the oaths and limitations put in place. If the glove was a conjured object and the freezer tank also one—and he was certain about the tank, a bottomless box that was containing much more than the suggested capacity of its size—then it was feasible that she poured her aura into more than one single thing, and relied on various conjured tools to carry her work, which could mean that there were more of her nen objects he was yet to see, or maybe none, Cheadle choosing instead to utilize other affinities.

Ten years. It really did hit him now, what Ging said.

Ten years were long enough to fill a nen-user's entire arsenal with new techniques and refined old ones, and Cheadle was smart and disciplined enough to have done just that.

As he watched them study the obscure materials stuck to this branch, Pariston felt an all-encompassing, pure, cold sense of determination. Catch up to them? Of course he can catch up to them. That was easy, and hardly the only thrilling part—what filled him with electrifying joy was the possibility of acquiring new ways to build and destroy, of re-inventing himself all over again, and if he had no choice but to do it with a deformed half-nen he shared with Cheadle then so be it.

After all, his nen had always been deformed.

"It's clothes," she said, confirming his thoughts. "Rubber, plant compost, and grains, interestingly enough." She looked up at him. “There's a grains storage chamber in the back, but it’s mostly empty." Cheadle said. "It seems like the bulk of those grains have been dumped in the water tank."

"Likely to make the grains inedible." Ging said. "The water here isn’t really an issue. They have a water source nearby, they could always draw from it, but those grains are mainland stocks, probably enhanced. Their loss would've meant a serious hit to the settlement's food security."

"You think someone was trying to make them go hungry?" Cheadle asked, turning away from them to fill a vial with the contaminated tank water.

Ging shrugged. "I always thought some kind of internal conflict had erupted here. Did you see the bullet holes in some of the walls? Shotguns were fired at some point, probably by some settlers at others. Monopolizing or destroying food is a pretty effective warfare strategy."

Somebody or a few didn't want to play along and threw a tantrum, Pariston thought. Tossing food and other things in water? It struck him as a child's move, ruining the game for everybody because he wasn't winning, not realizing that by doing so there would be no more games to play.

“What about the pieces of clothes?” He asked. “Could this have been a way to dispose of evidence? I wonder if they were trying to get rid of something.”

The three stared at each other. Over them, the sun was waning, the sky growing darker with rain-heavy clouds.

"Let’s keep looking.”

Completely bereft of people, reclaimed by indifferent nature, many houses in the settlement have become roosting sites and nests and burrows, others have collapsed completely under the weight of big, rampaging wildlife and new, bristling growth of trees and moss. Each cement box a coffin and a gallery, they walked on concrete and shattered glass, among branching ivies and grubby grass, passed derelict dressers and cabinets and others yet that still stood, suffering much less damage, like time had only visited them in passing, but all were empty. If anything was left behind by the original residents, raiders must've looted it, from tables and chairs and personal items to the window glass itself, the reinforcement steel in the walls, the copper electricity wiring, the doors and doorframes and doorknobs. Anything that could be recycled was snatched, wrenched, dislodged, dug out.

Inside one of the more intact structures, the three sought refuge from the downpour that broke out. The unit appeared to have been a barn and a coop, a place for imported farm animals, thatched roof and wooden beams and a floor covered in withered hay.

Soft exhaustion settled over them as they dropped down to the hay and sat in their usual semi-circle close to the collapsed gate, watching the rain outside, the white cubes of houses shrouded in verdant, ever-encroaching flora.

Once again, Pariston felt it was up to him to say something. The atmosphere was so gloomy. Cheadle was staring down in a murky kind of resignation, like she was giving in to some voice in her head. Ging gazed outside at the rain, entirely unreadable.

Then, Cheadle sighed, tired of the silence. "Any more of that ghost story you were telling?"

Of course.

Another one of his mother's 'friends', this time the family welcomed a man by the name of Guido Schoop, a famous esper from the homeland.

An allegedly tantalizing figure, Pariston's mom had been corresponding with him for months by the time he deigned to travel from the Caledonian capital to visit their Gutedel home, after much insistence and the promise of a handsome payment.

The esper was tall, dark, learned, and—his mother kept saying—an 'absolute sensation' back in Caledonia. He had strong opinions on the indigenous populations and was a staunch nationalist, wasting no time in informing the family that their home was indeed haunted because Yurwans had once slaughtered a 'decent Caledonian family' in it and consequently set a curse upon the house.

At the coffee table enjoying tea and petit fours soon after his hasty arrival, Schoop regarded 14-year-old Pariston with a long, dubious look. The man was clearly not thrilled with the teen's presence, chewing his sweets slowly and washing them down with an insufferable sound, forced eventually to break eye contact with Pariston's unrelenting, suspicious stare.

"How do you balance your esper work with your government job?"

The man choked on his tea, then managed to clear his throat, pushed back his lush locks of black hair, embarrassment or mild suffocation reddening his pale face.

"You didn't tell me you were a civil servant, Mr. Schoop." His mother said, eyes a little wide with newfound curiosity, patting the man on the back to release the last of his coughs, then offered him a glass of water, not yet realizing the implications of a covert government worker being sent to their home.

With a pair of smarmy thin lips, he offered Pariston's mom a smile. "Once I discovered my natural abilities could help unfortunate people like your family, I quit my service in the state to pursue esper work full time."

 _Unfortunate people like your family_. Pariston seethed. A pathetic lowly government worker who wasn’t even smart enough to cover his tracks looking down on a 'poor widow' and her 'poor fatherless children'. He really thought he was doing them a service.

"You killed him?" Cheadle asked, dead serious.

Pariston laughed. "No, no. Something far more interesting than ghost seeing came out of him."

The illustrious Guido Schoop, Pariston would much later realize, was a nen genius.

Having divined some kind of unconscious ability using water cups, the esper instructed them to fill glasses of water and place them on every surface in the house, "To soak up and suck out malicious intents."

Not a place in the whole house to rest your palm without knocking down a glass, Mr. Schoop held his mother's hands tightly in his, assuring her that he always had a way of extracting the intentions of ghosts.

"But not the ghosts themselves?" Lillian had asked, having convened with Pariston to make the esper as uncomfortable in their house as possible. She was cloyingly flirtatious with him and patted her eyelashes at his bemused face every chance she got.

Fifteen and beautiful like a sunny day, Lillian, much like her brother, believed she could always get whatever she wanted. And she wanted, simply and childishly, to mess with the esper, her ire growing at him the longer he spent with them.

For the period of time which the man lived in their house—and they introduced him, against his will, as a distant cousin of their mother whenever anybody asked—Pariston and Lillian played endless mind games with the man, going so far as to pretend they were in an incestuous relationship. Lillian would purposefully wear a revealing gown and exit Pariston's room in a hurry, just when she knew the man was out at night for one of his remarkably consistent bathroom visits. She'd meet him in the hallway, smile conspiratorially at him, and scurry to her room in feigned shame.

Truly, back then, Pariston indulged his sister's belief that the esper was never going to leave. He fed her suspicions that their mother took a fancy to him and purposefully sabotaged his work so that he stayed longer and longer with them. For weeks, Pariston and Lillian envisioned and mocked and ruined that imaginary union ten times over.

And just when they thought he was going to propose to their mom, Guido Schoop announced privately to her his interest in none other than Cicilia, an interest Pariston had sparked and carefully laid the groundwork for.

Cicilia, on the other side, was also interested, and had been silently interested for quite some time, too, but, believing just like her sister that their guest had eyes only for her mother, kept her crush to herself.

Revanche Hill, on her end, and as her youngest child and confidant knew very well, had plans of her own.

Hearing the news one evening, taking advantage of the esper’s temporary absence to finally sit together in the living room, their mom reclined back in her favorite chair, mouth open, and with barely a shred of sensitivity confessed to the plan she's been weaving for more than three weeks.

"I was setting him up with Lillian, love."

The tea grew cold in Cicilia's hands. Her face pale, her naturally melancholic visage hardening, she smiled at all of them. "I think Guido and Lillian would make a great a couple."

"Pardon?" Lillian yelled, almost jolting off the couch. "I don't care for him at all!" Then she went on, also without a shred of sensitivity. "I think he's absolutely, completely, _utterly_ repulsive. I wouldn't touch him in a million years. How about you don't go and decide shit for me."

"Language, Lillian!" Their mom said, her usually serene face contorting in admonishment. "I admit I'm quite surprised by this; I didn't foresee his interest in Cicilia at all."

“Why would you? It’s _you_ he seemed to like.” Lillian snorted. “He’s all over you, I thought he was going to propose any minute.”

“Nonsense!”

Lillian laughed. “So let me get this straight. He’s not interested in you, and you didn’t foresee his interest in Cicilia, but you did foresee his interest in me, a fifteen-year-old teenager?"

"Chaste courtship you evil girl," their mom hissed. "I was courting prospective suitors when I was younger than you."

"Chaste courtship? What is this, the 18th century?" Lillian glanced at their mother in shock, then at Cicilia, then at Pariston, her mouth open, another laughter about to burst forth from her chest. "This is a different time, mom. People nowadays don't marry off their infants straight out of the womb."

"I didn't suggest marriage right away, Lillian, I merely suggested dating."

"And then marriage when I'm eighteen."

"Well, why not?"

Lillian groaned. "Mom, you want to hand me off to that crazy?"

"He's far from crazy, he’s been helping us and handling far more than he deserves."

"Pariston, help me here, will you."

Before he could say anything, his mother shushed him. "You think I have been blind to how both of you torment that poor man?" She pinned them with a hard, reprimanding stare. "I thought all that was because Lillian fancied him and was being coy. You two are merciless."

"Maybe if you bothered to ask me how I feel from time to time you wouldn't have thought that." Lillian stood up, her eyes suddenly filled with tears, feeling terribly insulted and belittled. "And you know why you were 'courting prospective suitors' when you were my age, mom?” She sneered, merciless like her mother just accused her, wiping her tears before they fell. “It’s because your shitty father was exhibiting you around for just the right push up the social ladder. _And here you fucking are_."

When Lillian stormed out of the living room in sobs, Pariston was left alone with their mother. Cicilia, at one point during the fight, had left them, too.

In mortified shock, Revanche sat still like a statue in her chair, not even blinking, her pretty blue eyes murky with tears.

"Sorry, mom."

She tossed a pillow hard at his face. It hit him with a dull thud and dropped to his lap.

"You demon." She spat the word out, like she was repelling him, her expression dimming at retracing everything and realizing he's been spinning this whole thing to his whims.

The next morning, Guido Schoop's bags were out on the porch. They thanked him warmly and bid him farewell with sunny smiles.

And just as Pariston wanted, the government-assigned intruder left their house, never to set foot in it again, not even their home in mainland Caledonia, years later, when Cicilia married him in secret.

Inside the house, the four of them went about cleaning the contaminated water cups, the colorless liquid in each glass swarming with impurities, little patches of oil swaying on the water surface inside each glass.

Dish washing took a while that day.

"Did it work?" Cheadle wondered.

Pariston shook his head. "Only when he was there. Once he left, the ghosts returned like nothing's happened."

"And you only knew it was actually nen much later?" Ging asked.

"Yeah," he nodded. "Back then I was none the wiser about these things. The first time I interacted with aura consciously, I instantly recognized that sensation. Schoop's ability let him store postmortem aura in his water cups, but only temporarily, and because ghosts are nothing but postmortem aura, they returned once we dumped the water.” Pariston smiled, feeling terribly nostalgic. “I don't think he even realized the full potential of his ability; as long as it garnered him mild fame, he stuck to what worked, pretending to have contact with the supernatural to impress people who didn't know any better."

Ging stretched out his injured leg, then laughed, remembering something. "Have you watched the documentary Inside Enary House? It's a bunch of idiots investigating the truth behind a haunted mansion. It's funny to watch it as a nen-user.” He snorted. “The team in it called themselves ‘ghost hunters’, and I know _real_ ghost Hunters, people who actually devote their careers to investigating postmortem aura through nenology."

Cheadle smiled. "There are exactly three ghost Hunters in the Association and they all hate each other."

"They still hate each other?" Ging laughed. "What are they up to nowadays?"

She chuckled. "Ensnared in mutual accusations of plagiarism."

"That's not the first time."

"I know." Cheadle shook her head, simultaneously fond and amused.

"The smaller the discipline the harder the competition." Pariston said.

Cheadle rolled her eyes. "How would you know competition when you've ruined the career of everybody who so much as tried to step in your turf."

"You mistake my gatekeeping for backstabbing."

"And you've done plenty of both."

Pariston shrugged. "I'm protective of my accomplishments. You are, too." He gave her a look. "Most of the scientific papers you authored are behind passwords and paywalls, or am I remembering wrong? Even your Hunter coworkers can't access some of your work, let alone civilians." His fingers tilled the hay under them. "There was never a worthy person I didn't let in. I'm discriminating but fair."

A wry smile appeared on her face. "So fair you start testing their worthiness by constantly pointing a knife to their backs."

"Of course!" Pariston grinned. "Where's the fun otherwise?"

 _One foot in the grave_ , it's what Netero used to say. That's the life of a Hunter; all Pariston ever did was give these people a little push, and if they fell down and tumbled to their death, too bad. Those worthy enough land on their feet. Cheadle and Ging knew that very well.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Pariston was at his best whenever there was a knife to his back, too.

For the rest of the afternoon, the three spent their time sheltered from the rain, talking.

It was a gruesome sight, but Cheadle was hopeful about those batmonkey samples. A pathogen which infects only primates can greatly narrow down her research, and a primate that lives close to a once-populated settlement even more so. Ging recounted everything he knew about that animal, from their diets and mating habits to population distribution and similar species. This could also be connected to the infected children, if indeed they came from this settlement, which didn’t look it. This place hasn't been inhabited in years.

Still, she said, if those monkeys were dying from this disease then they weren't the natural reservoir. The sheer scale of the continent and the innumerable creatures who crawled its expanse, coupled with the comparably tiny pool of infected people and animals made her work unbearably difficult. They might very well never find the reservoir. There were so many starting points and each led to a chase that could take up a lifetime. Not even Ging knew everything.

Not even Don.

Once the rain stopped, they resumed their exploration of the settlement and its units. Boots trailing mud paths, they entered house after house, encountered a couple agile antelopes that scurried away the moment they stepped into one of the houses, so panicked they leapt out of a window.

Glass broken and door wrenched off its hinges, the house contained a kitchen and a bedroom sectioned into two parts by a white, filthy drape that hung loosely from the low ceiling. One side, the smaller one which Pariston imagined was for children, was empty. The other had a wooden block of a bed, bereft of sheets or a mattress.

In the kitchen, on a wall to his left, Pariston saw a clock designed like a honeycomb. 6:24, indefinitely. He picked it off the nail it hung on and turned it around. They’ve taken the batteries out. In hopes that something worthwhile was inside this ugly object, he flicked the clasps holding the back frame together then slid it off to reveal the thin board underneath. Nothing.

Returning all pieces to their places, Pariston hung the clock back on the wall.

Then a loud thud. He turned around.

"A basement." Cheadle muttered, crouching over a staircase in the ground, leading down to darkness. She looked up at them. "Whoever lived in here must've built it themselves. Basements weren't on the official blueprints."

She looked exhausted. Yet another underground passage. They tossed a pebble inside it. It blobbed in some kind of liquid.

"I'll go down." Pariston offered, but Ging was already down the stairs.

"It's water," he said, his back still visible, but it soon disappeared. "At least it looks like water."

Cheadle passed him a flashlight when he stretched his arm out, then she turned away from the staircase and continued looking around.

"Are you alright?" Pariston asked.

She hummed, her back to him as she opened empty cabinets over her head. "Why do you ask?"

"I'm worried about you."

"Don't." Cheadle slammed a cabinet shut and turned to look at him. "Don't pretend you care about me. You certainly don't have to."

"Don't have to care about you or don't have to pretend I do?"

"Both."

"You were in a better mood this morning." Pariston said, hearing under them the faint sounds of ripples in the water knocking objects against others.

"Sorry for not bouncing in joy after seeing a bunch of diseased animals." She said, her back to him again, getting lucky with a cabinet that opened to what appeared like wood bowls.

Pariston walked to her, the cabinets high over her head but perfect for his height. He stood right behind her, her head to his chest, held her fingers in one hand while the other pulled down the bowl. He set it on the counter before her, her hand still in his.

"Please don't do this." Cheadle said, but she didn't push him or turn around, only pulled her hand from his. She sounded neither angry nor nervous, just terribly quiet he felt she might wither against him.

He wanted to wrap his arms around her, but didn’t. In the end, he just bent his head down to nuzzle in her hair. The bowl was empty. He had hoped it would contain something.

"I can't stop thinking of the settlement, and the refugees." She murmured. “I wanted to get somewhere by coming here, but there’s nothing.”

"What are you worried about?" He rested his cheek on her head. "Do you fear we'll return to the settlement to find everybody ill, or dead? Are you afraid you're wasting time here, with us?"

She didn't say anything.

"You have to let go, sometimes." Pariston whispered. "Like you did yesterday."

Cheadle pulled her head from under him then turned around to face him. She was smiling. "Yesterday was a one night stand, Pariston."

"Is that so?" He smiled, caressed her hair, tucked a lock behind her ear, brushed her long bangs away from her forehead. "Ging and I must've been so terrible then."

"It was the worst sex I've ever had." She patted his shoulder dismissively. “Could’ve been worse for a man who hasn’t had sex in ten years.”

"Psst."

Ging appeared from the stairway, and was most definitely watching and eavesdropping way before he announced his presence.

In his hand, he brandished a crab-like, disk-shaped crustacean clacking sharp claws that circled its entire body. "Found a whole lot of these down there," he grinned, already fond of the beady-eyed bluish gray creature. "I've never seen ones in this color before. Found them munching on bugs."

Ging put the disk crab down on the floor and watched it scurry away on its pointy legs, skittering around the room curiously, then making an awkward pivot back to him, bypassing his arm to return to its brethren down in the basement.

"Anything else down there?" Cheadle asked, stepping away from Pariston, hastily rearranging her hair prior to his messing with it.

"Nothing noteworthy, except the crabs. Seems like the settlers really took all their valuables with them." Ging sat on the last step of the staircase, half his pants soaked in water. "Broken pipes connected to the tank caused the flooding; the damage is pretty wide-spread." He looked at them. "The way the pipes look, I think it was intentional."

"Looks like someone here was really upset." Pariston said, looking at the shattered glass windows and broken doors.

Outside, darkness began falling.

The brilliant orange sunset of yesterday was replaced by hazy, misty blues. A damp, melancholic silence pervaded the forest.

"It's going to rain again." Ging said, standing at the door. The oncoming rainstorm he smelled yesterday has finally arrived, first in little droplets, then a waterfall.

The world outside turned into a sheet of opaque glass.

"This is bad." Cheadle said, sighing in frustration.

"It's better to stay put until it's over." Ging said. "Everything is hiding right now."

They didn't even have yesterday's luxury of a warm fire. Wind currents blustering inside the house, lighting a fire in here would suffocate them.

All three standing at the door, Pariston inspected the hinges, barely holding onto the frame, surrounded by small cracks infested with dark little worms, wriggling and slithering over each other, slick and slippery.

When he inched his face closer, he could hear the wet, slimy sound of their collective writhing.

At first, he only wanted to see what kind the hinges were, what they were made of and how they were made, looking closely at three beaten nails beside a fissure, then a discolored layer of plaster drew his attention.

Inside an almost imperceptible fissure in the wall that’s been plastered over, just under the deteriorating doorframe that was sloughing off at the sides, Pariston’s eyes pried a peculiar object.

Something red and grimy.

Face close to the doorframe, he needled his finger in the deep fissure, among the worms, trying to drag the little something out with the pad of his finger. His nail caught the edge of a loose thread, and he managed to pull it closer until there was enough space to insert a second finger and pinch it out.

Between his index and middle fingers, Pariston held a thin slip of old, tattered cloth, folded once, botched and stained.

The other two were staring at the new discovery in his hand as well.

Stepping closer to him, the three stood in a circle. Pariston opened it.

It was a letter.

**_"For Manar, when she comes back_ **

**_I write this knowing you might never find it, but hoping, nonetheless, that you will. In my head, you are always returning, because my most cherished memory is of you, at my door. That’s how I envision you, often. I write, too, because I cannot speak, and I must tell you that I can no longer remain in this place. Something dark and sinister follows my every move, and I believe it is not a mere convulsive hallucination due to my sickness, such as the ones you witnessed me endure. I see it when I sleep, I see it when I open my eyes. It looks at me, it sees me. Even when I gaze across to the house, where we used to meet, I only glimpse darkness._ **

**_You left with ten people, now I am left with less. Everybody here believes I am losing my mind. In such a terrible place, I have come to be that which they fear most. Being sick, none of them touch me, or speak with me. I have been locked inside, in the house, for fear I might infect one of them. Although no one is allowed near me, somebody I don’t know slips food and water for me under the door. They are not the food and water of the settlement. I'm not hungry or thirsty. I feel neither agony nor relief, and I have come to believe the only way to survive is to keep moving, so I will keep moving. When I move, nothing hurts._ **

**_Please forgive me. It is selfish, but I have resolved to abandon the settlement. I dare not close my eyes in this place anymore._ **

**_I return to you that which you have given me. It's hidden in our house. You will know where to find it._ **

**_Yours in dissolution,_ **

**_Hanan"_ **

It wasn't written in the lingua franca but in simplified standard Kakni, the common language of central Kakin. Written in haste but not scribbled, the ink with which it was composed, and from the ways it dried on cloth, smudged in some places and faded in others, betrayed the apparent calmness of the writer with their underlying desperation and fear.

For a long moment, the three stood in silence, rereading the letter, each in their own head.

Clearly, the person who wrote it had no access to any decent writing materials, no paper and not even ink, because the closer Pariston looked the more it was apparent to him that the droopy characters weren't written in ink but some kind of sap, perhaps extracted from a local plant.

Ging took the letter from him, his eyes inspecting the wrinkled sentences closer, reading it again and again, a restive gleam in his eyes. "The word 'house' appears in three instances but written differently each time. See? The character for ‘house’ in 'gaze across to the house', ‘locked inside the house’ and ‘hidden in our house’ is different in each one."

"Maybe they're speaking about two distinct places," Cheadle said. "One where they were locked, the other their actual house?"

“Why only two when the variation is across all three instances?”

Cheadle pointed to the letter. “Because the first house mentioned is not referred to in the possessive. It seems to just be a place where they used to meet and not somewhere they lived.” She said, her finger hovering over the first paragraph. "Besides, the character for ‘house’ in the first paragraph is the one used in official Kakin documents to refer to individual housing units in DC settlements, but 'house' in the other two paragraphs is a colloquial transliteration written two ways. The distinction here seems pretty deliberate.”

“One using official state lingo, the others using common parlance,” Pariston hummed. “The distinction itself might hold special meaning to the two people involved, like a shared secret language. There isn't really a general communicative difference between the three characters, but it's not just a stylistic distinction, is it? The letter writer clearly meant to denote different places for a reason."

"Maybe it's red herring." Ging said. "There's something hidden in a place probably only the two of them know of, yet the writer outright says it’s in their house, which would be a big, stupid giveaway. If it were truly in their house, the house other settlers definitely knew, then the writer wouldn’t have disclosed it so carelessly. ‘Our house’, in this instance, is likely meant to mislead, a deliberately false clue so that if any of the settlers found this letter, they would look in the wrong place. I think each house here does refer to a different place.” He leaned against the wall, the letter unfurled in his hands in its frayed edges. “Can we know if this house is even one of them?”

“Going by the bedroom inside, there’s a chance it might be the isolation house.” Cheadle said. “Empty beds separated by curtains, sectioned off. The smell of it.”

Ging stepped outside the house, scouting the block around them with his eyes, then went back inside and stood before the lone front window with its broken glass.

He was drawing a mental diagram out of clues.

“Let’s assume this house is where they were locked up, this would mean that their meeting spot was close enough to be seen from this window, considering it’s the only window in this house.” Ging said, pointing to an unassuming housing unit twelve meters opposite the one they stood in. “‘the house where we used to meet’.”

The house where they only glimpsed darkness.

“The house where something is hidden is neither this one nor that."

“How can we know which one is their actual house?” Cheadle asked.

“It could be any house in the settlement.” Ging said. “It could even be this one. Nothing suggests they dedicated a whole unit to isolate the sick, so there’s a good chance that this Hanan was forcibly house-bound.”

The three gathered beside each other inside the house, marred in darkness. This had been a place for the mad and ill, and the very air of it suddenly felt different.

“We’re not going to follow this mystery, are we?” Pariston asked, eyeing the desolate doorway to the sectioned bedroom.

“No,” Ging folded the letter. He looked at them and smiled, but it was faint and preoccupied. “We have our own to solve.”

He was about to return it inside the fissure behind the doorframe but Cheadle stopped him. She tore a little piece off the edge of the cloth then returned it herself to its place. “Might contain relevant microbes.”

Without saying anything, the three had seemed to agree silently that the house was too creepy to sleep in, so they returned to the barn and the relative warmth of the hay.

Inside the dark walls of it, the three lay next to each other, shuffling around until they found a comfortable angle.

In the middle, Pariston stared up at the fragile, stained roof, marred with dark blotches like oil in water.

Way before Schoop entered their lives, Cicilia screamed and came running one night, face glistening with tears, eyes puffy and red, hands shaking. Everybody woke up in the house to the sounds of her sobs.

On the floor between their mother's arms, she begged her to take them away, begged her to leave the house and live somewhere else.

Anywhere, she said, anywhere.

She couldn't take it anymore. The old ghosts in her room had been tormenting her endlessly, locking the door on her and making her sleep on the floor, breaking her stuff and refusing to leave her room, pushing Cicilia out of it to reclaim it for themselves.

All three children gathered around her, their mother promised they'll go to their lake house just before winter hits Gutedel next month. Away from ghosts and everybody else, just them, she assured, and until then, if Cici wants, they can all sleep together in the same room. Cicilia nodded vigorously, on the verge of another breakdown, trying to hold them all with her trembling arms.

That night, their mom made a fortress out of her big bed, using their best sheets for the mattress, filling it with big pillows and hanging pretty drapes from the roof to the bed posts, barring the outside world from the alternate one she created for her children.

And this was Pariston's entire world in those days, a warm bubble of domestic bliss that, years from then, he was going to burst open like an infected blister.

Was he going to do the same to this little wolf pack? Was he going to tear it open from the inside, claw his way out of blood and entrails and start moving towards something else, like he always does?

 _Yours in dissolution_ , he thought long of this phrase, hands over his heart. What was the night for?

He turned to them, their beautiful eyes no less filled with ghosts and death.

"I hope Hanan and Manar find each other."

The night was for hauntings, and decay.

**III**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1) The idea of ghosts in their world is undoubtedly hilarious. Can you imagine living in a world where paranormal science is legit and psychic phenomena can be explained through nen, which is itself a psychic phenomena? I'd love it.
> 
> 2) I should have added the tag "Moms" to this fic. Moms will happen in this fic.
> 
> 3) One of my dream projects that will probably never be realized is writing Pariston's origin story in the style of a Jane Austin novel. Feel free to write that if it strikes your fancy; I lay no claims.


	12. To Share in this Smallness

In the dark depths of the continent's south, the land scarcely resembled anything on the planet.

On the fourth day of their journey, Cheadle had pretty much discarded the map. Ging's senses were the only thing keeping them from getting lost.

They were no longer trekking soil and scouting a somewhat comprehensible landscape, but a near featureless land of compost, walking on ground made of amorphous trees whose roots were so massive and old they disappeared completely under yards of rotting overgrowth. Every branch a mammoth tree, every tree an entire ecosystem teeming with the oddest, most curious organisms, the three walked in darkness for three days, and even glancing at her watch no longer made sense.

Trees closer to the shore whose genetic makeup was closer to that of their peers on mainland gave way to alien life forms, tortuous stems, moving patches of spiky moss, limbs that sprouted out of limbs, spirochetes crawling on every surface, marring skin, an uncanny, winding evergreen.

The tree bark was mellow and sodden, fragile under their feet, long, drooping grass bruiting over it, crevices in wood sprouting exotic flowers and entire branches seized by a myriad of fungi species, every crack and fissure swarming with highly venomous insects, reptiles and amphibians. Under their feet and between the crisscrossing of thousands of hollowed, shaky wood bridges sat pools of toxic water rife with blind, iridescent, carnivorous fish and the millions of invisible organisms they fed on as well as whatever luck dropped down to them from the ground above.

This place was a desert, for humans. Nothing to eat, nothing to drink, the air itself thick and musty and condensed, hardly breathable, unbearably hot in some spots, heavy with scents of ancient, infested, rotting wood, of odorous flora repelling predators and luring prey, of clingy slimy mollusks and every bodily fluid imaginable marking territories and mates, nests and burrows, feeding and hunting areas, a world of controlled chaos, of boundaries drawn by scent and enforced by merciless murder. Everywhere they looked, something was devouring another.

A seedy metropolis, the three navigated the forest like strangers in a mafia den—don't offend, don't take what's not yours, don't disturb the balance, and don't fuck with the precious younglings of the family.

An overwhelming cornucopia of scents and textures, sounds and sights, these primordial wet forests extended ahead for miles and miles, the overgrowth blocking even the faintest signs of day, any sunlight above filtering through as a blue, glowing mist, and every night, the water levels rose, so they had to climb up away from the toxic ponds and take shelter beside less than welcoming animals similarly escaping an early water grave.

In this place, three humans were the strangest, most peculiar organisms. When they weren't treated with outright hostility, they were mostly avoided.

To arrive in this natural wonder, they uncharitably perused the bodies of various large mammals and birds for transportation. To cross miles and miles quickly, they rode on the backs of sturdy, long-necked tapirs, clung to the talons of four-winged birds, and were chased for half a day by a tribe of trickster apes with whips for tails seeking to bargain with them (the three bargained away pieces of clothes, their soap, their coffee, and a vial of red ants straight from Cheadle's nitrogen tank that interested the rowdy monkeys greatly. In return, the apes fell into their trap, their concentrated presence drawing out predators, a hunter pack of silent scimitar leopards with serrated teeth the size of fully grown men and eyes that shone in the dark like stained glass, built for speed to catch clever, quick-footed prey. That was their next chauffeur.)

Despite basically spreading her body over a slippery surface hanging precariously over a death trap, those nights they'd spent high in tree hollows gazing down at the glowing fish were Cheadle's favorite. This was her heaven. She could spend a whole life time here studying the innumerable creatures and plants that not only inhabited but shaped and unshaped this place over and over again.

A serene, peaceful sensation filled her body as she curled against tree trunks, willfully hypnotized by beautiful killer fish with glimmering scales dancing circles in dark water, the ripples of their movement shadows against the world above, the water ponds like projectors in a dark theater, and they were surrounded by so much wonder that talking about themselves felt superfluous, it would mean nothing. To her, that was a slight comfort.

Ever since their night in the cave, Cheadle put it upon herself to telegraph no desire whatsoever. Increasingly, her assertion to Pariston that it was a one-night stand was growing concrete, and if it wasn't a serious decision back then it had become one after their encounter with the infected monkeys.

Rarely one to act on impulses, she was still slightly amazed at herself for having initiated it at all to begin with.

Cheadle had braved it, had taken the chance, because she convinced herself that if it did happen, it will only happen once, and if she was going to live that fantasy once, then it might as well be now. It seemed, then, like the right moment, the only moment, a liminal space they entered only once and never again. Most of its appeal, even, was the idea of it as a single night hookup, a crazy fling she can keep to herself as a secret for all of eternity, as something she can look back on with enjoyment and think 'holy shit that actually happened'.

Light specks dancing over her hands, Cheadle sunk into the details of that night. She didn't have hopes that it was going to happen again, not during or after. She had thought that sex 'might' happen, and jumped naked into the lake with that thought in mind, not entirely ready to be rejected but not letting that fear stop her, thought that she either won't like it or would feel terrible after it ended, would feel embarrassed and shameful and unwanted, but none of that was the case, which irked her further, made it harder to just let go of it.

Something she never in a million years believed would happen happened, and it was good in a way that was reinvigorating and affirming and beautiful and she so desperately wanted it to happen again.

Framing it in her mind as a one-night stand was at once a source of secret excitement and gripping sadness. But it didn't matter how Cheadle felt about it. Whatever she wanted had to take a backseat to her mission, her duty.

Giving in to the smallest of desires almost always ended in bad things for her.

No matter how much she wanted or desired them (and she wanted and desired them every time she looked at them, every time she woke up to their faces) Cheadle didn't act on it, and it's not like she had to learn anything new to resist it. She'd spent twenty years managing it perfectly well, more or less, and had developed enough defenses to protect herself not just from them but from herself wanting them. Moreover, she genuinely enjoyed their company—a near complete, deliberate avoidance of physical proximity notwithstanding, and recognized that this was a safe, sustainable dynamic. She enjoyed the nights they spent talking over deadly water, or in the crevice of a tree a thousand times their age; enjoyed conceding temporarily on an argument simply because she was falling asleep only to resume it in the morning as if no time had passed at all, liked dozing off to their belligerent chatter. She was often hungry and cold and smelled like shit but she didn't mind it. The mystic air here was poisoning her in all the slow, delicious ways.

They had fallen into a nightly, pre-bed routine of cleaning and re-bandaging Ging’s leg, and if she didn't approach him for it he came to her himself. Alone one night after Pariston retreated to sleep early, complaining of a headache, Cheadle and Ging sat side by side on a low hanging branch, their feet dangling over the luminous water, tempting fate to try and trip them down.

Watching the fish swim about, the two played a little game of who can spot the most animals around them. They reached a draw.

"That wasp there," Cheadle pointed after five minutes of silent scouting. "This raises my score to 150."

"I already pointed out that exact same wasp." Ging argued.

"No you didn't."

"I did. Still 149." He gloated.

She frowned. "Can you even prove it's the same?"

"Can  _ you _ prove it's not the same?"

They chuckled, fell into silence, staring down at their bare feet lulling over water.

"How can we be sure that Pariston's haunted house story isn't just some bullshit?" She asked conversationally, watching the contentious wasp beat its wings and fly away.

"We can't." Ging shrugged. "It really might just be some bullshit, but why care either way? It’s a story."

"Why do you let Pariston lie?” She asked, recognized it as one of her oldest questions. “You let him lie so openly and you just smile and nod. He lies, and you know he lies, and he knows you know, but you just let it happen. Why?"

“Because that’s just the way he is.” Ging said. “The way I see it, he consoles himself through these antics. It comforts him to know we know he’s a liar. He finds joy in it. What I’m I gonna say to him, stop lying? I don’t care. He is what he is.”

“You’re basically saying you let him lie because it makes him feel better.”

Ging shrugged. “Yeah, basically.”

She didn’t say anything.

“You don’t get it, huh.”

Cheadle laughed. “No.”

“You’ll be spending a lot of time with him whether you like it or not, so just get used to the uncertainty." He looked at her, smiling. "It's what makes being around him so fun."

"So easy for you to say that."

"It's not. You think he doesn’t hold it against me too?" He said, his voice distant. "To him, I helped you destroy his world, don't forget that. He’s building it up again; denying him that will just become part of his new blueprint." He sought her eyes. "I think you should take him at face value much more than you do."

Cheadle scoffed. "Face value? Pariston Hill? Are you serious?"

"I'm deadly serious," Ging said. "You conflate his insincerity with dishonesty, but you know well those two aren't the same. He's more honest than you give him credit for, but you're an earnest person, so his insincerity sets off your alarms, yet it's not necessarily an indication of anything.” He smiled. “Pariston is totally himself with us, isn’t that a good thing?"

She just looked at him without saying anything.

"Sometimes you gotta let people have their bullshit."

"What's your bullshit, Ging?"

He yawned. "Don’t make this serious."

“Really now?” Cheadle grimaced. “Just go to sleep.”

Shadow of water rippling on his face, Ging sniffed back sleepy tears. "You're gonna stay here?"

"Yeah, I don’t feel like sleeping." She smiled at him as he stood up. "See you tomorrow morning. Or evening. Who fucking knows anymore."

"Goodnight."

Cheadle watched him climb the tree and crawl into the hollow where Pariston lay, then he dropped something to her lap. A loopy snail. “150. I win.”

She flipped him. “Cheater.”

Her gaze shifted back to the water, to her feet, a yellowish green in the pool light, the perturbed snail in her palm peeking its head out of its shell, and thought, like she had been since reading it, of the letter in the wall.

_ I have been locked, in the house, for fear I might infect one of them. Being sick, none of them touch me, or speak with me. _

More than any secret belongings or shared language, Cheadle pondered the use of that house to isolate the sick. What kind of sick was Hanan? Was it a similar disease to the one in the southern settlement? Perhaps the very same one? What did Hanan mean, by being unable to speak? Was Hanan alone in the house or were there others?

There was a cruelty baked into the underpinnings of that letter, not just a state of physical isolation but an emotional one as well. Hanan had been cut off from the community, in a way, shunned and locked up, perhaps undergoing changes in body that scared the other settlers, already disturbed by what appeared to be the symptoms to some kind of pre-existing condition. Did they not have doctors with them? That place wasn't so much an isolation ward as it was a place of banishment. People there were not cared for but left to die unbothersome deaths, alone between four walls where nobody had to witness the wasting and degradation of their bodies, where their suffering was hidden in fear of upsetting public sentiments and morale.

The fear Hanan spoke of made Cheadle think that perhaps they were the only person to become sick, initially, at least. The singularity of their case might have even justified isolation in the eyes of the other settlers. Perhaps there were others kept in other houses that the letter writer themself didn't know of, and the more she thought of it all the more Cheadle was haunted by images of plagued settlements all across the continent, of the misfortune of disease befalling entire communities, of hundreds of people like Hanan and Gregory who were left to die alone because nobody knew what to do about them, because what they were suffering was too gruesome and scary and unknown, because the body no longer resembled a body, because terror was coming from within, where it cannot be escaped.

How could a single mind comprehend all that suffering? Cheadle felt so terribly alone and insignificant, so unbearably stranded. What can a single person do to alleviate this much pain? She loathed this ignorance, this dark sea, the way she'd so recklessly waded into it. She barely knew anything about this disease, barely knew how to even begin handling it. How much time did she have? How long will it take to reach even the smallest breakthrough? She was terrified, to her core, of failing—failing the southern settlement, failing herself, failing Ging.

Her worst nightmare was that all her work and effort will amount to nothing, in the end, that her presence here will make no difference and save no one.

Her toes hung over the toxic water, her whole body angled downward, her vision blurring, the luminescent fish mere flashes of light in her eyes.

A wasp landed on her knee. Its iridescent wings flickered, drawing her vision back into focus.

_ Can you prove it's not the same? _

Cheadle pulled herself back. In something a little mean, she threw the snail Ging had tossed her down to the fish, and left before seeing it noshed to nothing.

Inside the tree hollow, in a warm spot farther back, she found them curled up, asleep. Hopelessly, with a painful tightness in her chest, she wanted to lie down in that little space between them, a space that looked so abhorrently cut for her, but she didn't.

Closer to the entrance, she rested her body, facing them, watching the soft rise and fall of their chests.

Cheadle didn't come here for this. She didn't come here seeking the misadventure of a cracked pseudo-relationship with them out of some existential inertia. Did she?

**III**

In his pocket, Pariston felt for the iridescent yellow limpet that 'looks like him'.

He'd kept it on him since Cheadle put it in his hair beside the lake, and when he pulled it out now the shell gave off a faint but lovely gradient of yellow, a soft glimmer in the eternal, hazy darkness of this water forest.

He missed sunlight.

Ging said they'll be out of here by the end of the day, if nothing happened. Except Pariston could hardly tell which part of the day was passing; with no sunlight and a forest teeming with creatures who seemed to never sleep or rest, time was a lie.

The ground, a network of organic bridges, was no less timeless under their feet. Through cracks and ruts, he could glimpse furry little animals, swarms of bugs, fast reptiles whose scales glimmered for a moment before disappearing. There wasn't a single spot in this entire forest that wasn't called home by some ugly, cute, funny-colored critter with enough potent venom to kill all three of them.

In this place, fear had a particularly verdant scent. One drop of it meant instant death. The smartest here were the least seen, and the ones who hid their treasures best.

_ I return to you that which you have given me. _

Pariston enjoyed pondering that which was returned and left behind, the letter in the wall and its clues persisting in his mind days after reading it, an imagined voice reciting it aloud in his head whenever the world outside quieted down.

A part of him wished they could go back to pursue that, even if what was hidden turned out to be a worthless piece of junk. It wasn't their mystery to solve, nor were they the main characters of that story, and Manar finding the letter addressed to her would make a much better tale than three strangers finding it for her and rummaging in her house in search of what didn't belong to them, but that didn't mean Pariston couldn't indulge his imagination.

The letter hadn't upset him the way it did the other two, and he could tell that reading it had shifted something inside them for the worse, had nudged a thought or two onto a precipice.

An all-consuming illness and sinister monsters in the dark, Pariston folded the letter writer in his head and kept them there.

If he's meant to know, he will know.

The letter and its contents were not brought up again, even during their short moments of rest where they huddled together to carry out their end of the day routine, finding new ways each time to prolong this little ritual over the toxic water under their feet, inside the hollows of trees or over broken, sinuous branches.

Opposite each other, with Ging's leg over her thighs, Cheadle went about unrolling the bandages around his leg, and it was during these times that Pariston got to take a good look at Ging's lower left leg.

It no longer appeared as terrible and unsightly as it was in the ship infirmary, thanks to consistent care, but it didn't look good either, and didn't seem anywhere near full healing. Some of the surface skin damage was slowly repairing itself, but other than that, it looked truly and utterly fucked.

Throughout this nightly process, Cheadle would clean it, disinfect it, do a pain level test again, watch Ging downplay it, apply an antibiotic ointment to it, then wrap it in clean bandages once again.

Pariston would sit beside Ging as comfort, except all he could do to comfort was recount gruesome incidents that befell notable people and remind Ging that he was very lucky it was 'only' his leg and not, say, his face. Or worse, his dick.

“You would've truly been gone then.”

"Really appreciate the moral support here." Ging leaned back on his elbows, stuck between their snickering faces.

"Of course." Pariston smiled adoringly, twirling around his finger a long hair strand over Ging's forehead. "We all need a haircut."

Pariston had cut his hair before leaving the mainland, reluctantly and carefully, because he hated cutting it himself but had no choice, and now he noticed, a month later, that it's grown much faster than usual. He had also shaved before leaving the ship, and when he scratched his cheeks he felt the prickly growth covering his jaws and chin and over his lip.

He looked at Ging, at his patchy stubble. "You can’t grow a beard."

"No," Ging grumbled. “This is all there is to it. Enjoy.”

"I can’t either.” Pariston said. “That raggedy look suits you, but it would look terrible on me."

Ging searched Pariston's face with an almost derisive gaze. "What are you even complaining about, barely two hairs grow on your chin."

Pariston's eyes sought Cheadle's. "Do I look unseemly?"

She tied the final knot around Ging’s leg. "All the time."

Between the wavy, messy green locks of her hair, red was growing.

Pariston had only seen her natural hair color once, a very long time ago, before they'd even met properly, and would likely feel strange about her if she were to suddenly forgo dyeing it, which he doubted. She stuck to this hair color the way he stuck to his haircut, and he'd seen the boxes of dye she was diligent enough to bring along to the continent.

These moments of bandage changing constituted their lone instances of physical proximity. They were friendly with each other, and the atmosphere between them was pretty amiable and easy, but nothing even close to their night in the cave happened again.

Increasingly, Pariston was starting to believe Cheadle when she said it was a one-night stand. It hadn't bothered him at first because he thought she was either being facetious or lying to herself, and didn't know why it should bother him at all either way, but it did, more so that Ging, too, seemed to completely forget all about it. Did he take Cheadle up on her word?

Pariston wanted them to have sex again, and he acknowledged to himself very early on that this desire had nothing to do with alleviating any headaches. He wanted it for its own sake, because he liked it, terribly so, and sensed it lush inside him, this itch to do more, this part of his mind that's grown entirely preoccupied with lurid fantasies, increasingly irritated at the prospect of sex never happening again.

He wanted it because he was yet to even scratch their surface, still only skin-deep, and nothing this shallow was ever satisfying.

And it did not help that all around them, insects chirped with relentless, oppressive vigor, their collective chirr flowing into a kind of intermittent song, a melody that had meaning and significance, and the longer Pariston focused on it during their journey the more he caught on the musical patterns of this forest-wide mating call.

In the density of this soundscape, his headaches, until then manageable, flared. The pain clutched his temples like claws digging through his skull, and for the first time in their journey, for the first time in his life, Pariston had to stop at once because the spectrum of colors that burst in his eyes blinded him completely.

And for the first time, too, he asked Cheadle for help.

Stopping their endless march in the intestines of this arboreal beast, Cheadle walked back to him and set him down.

Her eyes were knowing.

"It's chronic, isn't it?"

Pariston hummed, didn't dare nod because he knew it'll make the pain worse, and even when closed the deranged rainbow of colors didn't disappear from his eyes.

"Since when?"

"Can't remember life without them."

"Describe the pain." She sat on the branch opposite him and placed the tips of her fingers to either side of his temples. "Where do you feel the pain coming from? Where do you feel it spreading?"

“It starts at the top of my nose bridge, between my eyebrows then down to my eyes and cheekbones, then up to the center of my head. Sometimes I feel it behind my eyeballs. At its worst, it spreads to my jaws and neck.” He laughed and regretted it instantly. It made the pain so much worse. “Apparently, that’s not the worst anymore.”

“You used to ease the pain with nen?”

“Yeah.”

“Idiot.”

Pariston knew the caveats of that. Wise nen-users avoided applying their aura to manage any kind of bodily ache; nen is capable of alleviating pain short term but made it worse in the long run. The more nen is used to heal injuries or reduce pain, the more useless it becomes at that and the less receptive the body to it.

If he broke his arm then healed it with nen, it will heal perfectly the first time, maybe second and third as well, but soon enough his nen will no longer work. The human body has to learn to heal itself; nen is not a healing method but an occasionally useful interference, so if one is constantly interfering with the natural healing process with their nen, their body will become less effective at mending itself. That was the thing with basic nen healing; just because you can do it doesn't mean you should.

Pariston had used it carelessly because he didn’t believe he was going to live long anyway. Certainly won’t reach forty. He used nen because he refused to revolve his life around his headaches. Refused to be controlled by the pain of them.

"Nothing ever worked," he said as her fingers pressed his temples. "No doctor knew how to help. There was no single diagnosis and no definite treatment.” He shrugged. “Using nen brought the best relief."

If people could just fix themselves with nen, Cheadle wouldn’t be suturing people’s open wounds, and she wouldn’t even be wearing glasses, for the matter.

“Why don’t you LASIK your eyes, by the way?”

Cheadle smirked. "Glasses are sexy.”

“She ran away from the clinic like a coward just before her name got called.” Ging said, laughing when she glared at him. “It’s the truth, admit it.”

“I didn’t run away,” Cheadle argued. “I talked to the nurse and told her I changed my mind.”

“Fine, so you ran away  _ politely _ .”

“You saw the machine they use. Like something out of a medieval torture chamber.” She said, frustrated. “I already regret asking you for support that day, Ging.”

“Why?” He stared at her. “Didn’t I leave with you when you left?”

“You should’ve pushed me to go through with it.”

“I saw the machine they use.”

“Right.” Cheadle turned back to Pariston, smiling wryly. “I just have a thing about my eyes.”

Pariston smiled. “I have the same thing but about my ears.”

“Because of the ghost?”

“And other things. One of the many grifters who used to loiter in our house leeching off my mom was a man who’d lost his left ear in mysterious circumstances, and I remember the sight of it to this very day. It’s so vivid in my head like he’s right here. Earless, just a hole the side of his head. I shudder even now.”

Forgetting earless ghosts and eye surgery operations, Cheadle gave him a serious look. “You’ve experienced these auras before?”

“No, this is the first time.” He said. “Although I know about aura headaches. Do you think that’s it?”

“I’m suspecting it.”

“What will you do?”

“Nothing.” She said. “I don’t have anything specific for this.”

“Use your nen.”

“No.”

They stared at each other.

“But this could have something to do with our nen.” He said, bringing up the subject with her for the first time since arriving. “You think that too, don’t you?”

“That’s why I won’t use it for this.” Cheadle said resolutely. “You said the headaches go away on their own, right? This one will go away too, you just need to wait.”

“Why do I need to wait?” Pariston asked. “Isn’t it my nen?”

Cheadle scoffed, looked away from him for a second. “Whatever the hell you think your nen is, it’s not anymore.”

“What is it then?”

“I don’t know.” She stared at him. “I don’t know what your nen is anymore, Pariston.”

Cheadle made to stand up but he grabbed her arms and sat her back down violently.

“What about yours?” He asked. “I can hold what you conjure like it’s mine, and you let me carry your little box because you want to see what it might do to me, to you. You took that risk. Why not do the same now?” Their foreheads were almost touching. “I’m hurting.”

“Suck it up.” Cheadle hissed. “I don’t care about your headache, and I won’t use my nen to make it better. Now let go of me.”

He didn’t.

“I can hurt you, Pariston.”

“I can hurt you, too.”

Her skin under his hands pulsated, and he felt it, felt their nen right under his fingers. Ugly, deformed, twisted. He tightened his grip.

Ging held Pariston’s hands, almost gently pulled them off Cheadle’s arms where they left red circles. “Stop it now,” He looked at Pariston. “Don might be able to help you. Don’t be a baby, just ride this one out.”

Heart thumping viciously in his chest, Pariston felt like he could tear both of their faces to shreds. His whole body tingled, his head pulsed and his vision grew blurry.

Ging sat back and sighed. “You two’s nen has turned the water.”

Under their feet, what was only moments ago a pool of crystal clear water had curdled like rotting bread into the bilious green and yellow of mold, unwitting fish caught in its putrescent clutches, spores that would otherwise be microscopic fructifying to large proportions, spiraling out of the sickly patches and up towards them, human-sized mold flowers shedding spore flakes like wind swept cotton-grass.

It took Pariston a moment to realize how every single stem twisted around to reach him, drooping its blighted heavy crown of pins towards his body.

Their big, fetid heads moved with the tilt of his own.

Pariston stared at them. They stared back.

**III**

_ It stares at me, it sees me _ .

Ging couldn't sleep.

In the darkness of their little cot, the ointment still cold under his bandages sent slight chills through his body. He lay on his back and blinked in total darkness, his eyes by now adjusted to the shapes and edges of his surroundings, and thought, for the hundredth time in a single day, of the letter in the wall.

Aspects of it wormed their way under his skin and burrowed there, the illness, the oppressive darkness, the feeling of constantly being followed and watched, the edge of sanity, the desperate desire to preserve whatever is left of one's self, the sense that so many of his dead or disappeared companions and team members could have written that letter—that he himself could have written it.

Since the first day of their journey, over the mouth of that ground cavern, hiding in the edge between forest and rock expanse, that creature hasn't appeared again.

Ging didn't know what it was, or what it wanted from him, because it was never him it wanted. Like a shapeshifting grim reaper, it appeared when death was close, but harvested no souls and claimed no bodies. It just stood, staring, disfigured and malformed, the human in it only a facsimile, an approximation, a distortion, and like the red-back elk, last of her kind, Ging kept this creature to himself. He didn't follow it or seek it, didn't talk about it or try to demystify it. It remained on the periphery of his life here, appearing less and less until it disappeared completely that he thought it a mere figment of his imagination.

That day, waiting alone under the rain for the rope to move, was the first time he’d seen it in years.

Was it the same creature that the letter writer saw? Did theirs have two hands like his has four legs? Did it walk on four or two? Did it have that same shifting, uncanny human face? Was it the one to feed them?

Did it lurk around the house because Hanan was dying?

Was Ging dying?

His hand trailed the ridges of his ribcage and sternum. It hurt to swallow. He breathed deeply, hearing that little wheeze in his chest, felt that particular heaviness.

The threat of coughing his lungs out was most acute in places like these, a crowded space in a low altitude away from sun and fresh air. Still, it wasn't nearly as bad as when they went swimming in the cavern or even the lake.

Most of the time, even, he forgot about it.

In the ship infirmary, he had waited for Cheadle to stop at his lungs during the examination and tell him that something was wrong, but she didn't. She had noticed the damage in his leg pretty quickly but not the one in his chest, not even through nen. Her aura under his skin, it caught nothing. Was he going to need an old-fashioned x-ray scan for this?

Maybe there was, indeed, nothing, because not even using his own nen to sense around for a foreign presence resulted in anything, and he had already been doubting any physical, material cause, but Ging felt it, now more than ever, this visceral clutch around his lungs, the metallic taste to the pile in his throat, the way his body betrayed him like it never did before—the way, at times, he felt removed from it, like he was perceiving it from the eyes of somebody else.

With every shred of willpower in him, he held onto the control he still had over it. It hasn't slipped out of his hands, it was still his body, his legs and lungs and mind. He hasn't lost it, and he refused to lose it. No matter how much damage it incurred and suffered, he wasn't going to let go of it. It was his, and he was going to carry on in it to the end, regardless of how much he hated the pain of it.

Did he hope that Cheadle would see it? He was more confused than irritated at how she didn't, how her nen passed over the damage without noticing it. She wasn't entirely honest about the state of his leg but wasn't nice about it either, and he doubted she'd know about his ailment and conceal it from him, if she had actually pinpointed anything unusual during the examination to begin with.

Ging could go dig knives in his leg but he couldn't cleave his chest open.

Why couldn't he just tell her? He hadn’t planned on telling her about his leg either but here they were, caring for it nightly, in the sheer fucking hopelessness of it. He himself was approaching her for it. Why was he letting it continue?

Ging loathed pity, and detested the thought of anybody feeling sorry for him. That's why he held back on revealing the worst of his physical state to her. He didn't want this grave need, didn't want to helplessly need anything, ever, from anybody.

He didn't want to be a burden.

Turning to his side, Ging observed their sleeping bodies, Pariston's eyelids fluttering, his arm stretched out, Cheadle curled in a ball, face buried in the crook of her elbow, the space between the three of them, each one in a corner, a misshapen triangle.

Every time he remembered their night in the cave or recalled images of it, a jolt of electricity zipped down his spine. He never considered himself a particularly sexual creature and his sexual history was the least exciting part of his entire life. If an opportunity for sex presented itself and he was in the mood he took it, but rarely sought it, rarely initiated it, rarely felt sexual desire in any persistent manner, but these past few days, leading them through uncanny terrain, he's had to actively stop himself on several occasions from falling completely into fantasy and daydreams.

Ging grumbled to himself. Was this going to be too much trouble? He had factored the sex like he factored everything else, but his plan was as loose as they come, and he was already prepared to shift gears at the slightest change in circumstance. He had planned for all possible contingencies, except, apparently, for this adolescent horniness that was infesting his brain.

His usually trusty post-sex policy of 'process it forget it and forgive everyone involved in it' wasn't working. It just backfired.

Something about Cheadle labeling it for all as a one-night stand was somewhat comforting upon first overhearing it; now he didn't have to add regular sex into the equation. Only this supposedly comforting thing grew to irk him more and more with each passing day, because his mind wouldn't fucking quiet down about it.

And Pariston had just gone and indulged her with his silence. Why did Ging wish the other man had called bullshit? Surely he recognized Cheadle was full of crap.

The worst sex she's ever had? Fuck her and her pretty lying mouth. Ging knew damn well what was the worst sex she’s ever had because she’d had it with him.

Fumbling drunkenly in her college campus room, taking an embarrassingly long time to find the handle to the zipper of her goddamn dress, his pants stuck awkwardly over his knees while her hands clumsily and shyly oscillated between undressing him and continuing that hand job, all punctuated and interrupted by mutual reassurances that yes, this was totally wanted on both ends, that no, her gender and body didn’t make him want her any less; no, bringing a weirdo strange man into her campus room isn’t going to cause her any trouble, and no, fucking a senior Hunter isn’t going to ruin her career forever. There wasn't worse than this, was there?

And a one-night stand? It couldn't be. It couldn't be because nobody could leave the room. Ging can't get up early and leave discreetly and politely before they wake up, thus sparing everybody undue awkwardness and stiff morning interactions. That was his number one rule and it didn't apply here.

They woke up to each other's faces every single morning and were going to live that reality for another week or so. Ging will eventually take refuge in his ship once they return, away from them and their bodies and the tempting closeness of them, but what will the other two do once they're alone together?

They'll just have to solve it like the hundred other things between them they have to solve, he thought. The grotesque show of nen entanglement the other day wasn’t particularly reassuring, though.

Was Ging being a reckless idiot about this? Was there something he was missing? Was that night a mistake? He was one to go with the flow, but whatever river is washing them in its turbulent path isn't going to have a soft landing.

Can he handle the fall, he asked himself. How many bones was he willing to break on the way down?

Ging didn't know, and still didn't have an answer when they woke up the next day and continued their journey out of the forest, spirits high and mood amicable.

Slowly, sunlight was seeping into the forest, and they were walking higher, trekking askew tree branches on their way to the light outside, cold, fresh air whipping their faces and a strong wind current swishing around them.

Ging unfurled his fingers, shivered pleasurably under the warm sunlight, his feet finally hitting solid ground, out of that malleable purple haze and into the open world.

A massive black bird shrieked above them, swiped the air and beat its powerful wings over their heads, shedding large feathers in its wake, gliding through the sky and away from the flat plateau where they stood, its flying figure growing smaller and smaller against the bright blue sky.

Before them, a deep, misty, flooded valley spiraled down.

He breathed, filling his parched lungs with cold air. Smiling brightly, Ging pointed down at the massive, lonely tree that sprouted up the valley, its base hidden in thick layers of fog, its branches heavy with big, vibrant summer-entrenched leaves, surrounded by a well-tended strip of land, protected on every side by water.

_ The only way to survive is to keep moving, so I will keep moving. When I move, nothing hurts. _

"There it is, Don's home."

**III**

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey everybody, I hope you liked this (relatively short) chapter.
> 
> First I want to thank everybody reading this story, vocally or silently. The response has been unreal to me, and I’m super grateful to everyone. That said, I went and shot all my load, so to speak, and now I have very little material to publish with any consistent schedule. I had plans to drop Chapter 13 (which is written) at the end of the year, but editing 17k+ words of dense, phone-scribbled nonsense is hard, and life has been hectic and exhausting, so I barely have time to sit down and do any serious editing. Chapter 14 is currently being written, also considerably long, also will take a while to be edited.
> 
> All that to say that chapter 12 will be the last for a while. I’m writing a little bit every day and I love this story more than life itself, so I want to give it time. I’ll come back in 2021 with a good bunch of chapters—three grotesquely long ones, preferably. Meanwhile you can find me on tumblr and twitter under the same name if you wanna talk HxH or anything else.
> 
> Thank you all so much, and happy fucking new year.


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